Soul cleverly inverts so many tropes and invokes so many movies I love that...

I bristle at the idea this is a children's movie kids won't love, because even if kids won't love this movie I don't think this is supposed to be that. This is Pixar doing all their usual manipulative (a word I want to use only to exploit it) tricks while making a firmly adult movie. This is Studio Ghibli reminding us that we're all in need of a little imagination sometimes, supremely talented artists reminding us that the best thing about a waking life are the dreams we have when we drift across the planes.

There's a heartwarming vision of transhumanism here - as well as more relatable transgednerism - as well as a stark refutation of nihilism, agnosticism and in many ways the opposites of all that. Soul's message traffics in unspoken idioms and triumphs over simpler philosophical understandings of the human struggle to make the argument humanity isn't constantly struggling for purpose or meaning, but a more generic love for new experiences. It's one thing to play the keys, another entirely to realize the keys will keep thudding long after you're gone.

The movie is beautiful, from its depiction of the afterlife and its bettors (and I do mean bettors) to the shadowy, lively state of its real world. At every moment one gets the impression director Pete Docter only settled on animation because the humor and imagery would have fallen slightly flat in an impressionistic piece featuring real bodies. So to might the message have been dulled by attempting to portray life and death as separate planes of animation in the true sense, of bodies interacting and experiencing.

One of my constant worries is death, and therefore one of my favorite genre of movies has always been an explanation thereof; aside from Tom Cruise fighting Henry Cavill aboard dueling helicopters, it's the one physical reality we can't truly understand. Soul wants to feel good about that, but understand we ultimately must feel bad - after all, this is just another imagined space our minds have created to soothe the eldering of all of us. If the movie does devolve into tropiness, it's for a purpose - that is all life ultimately is, and our growing rejection of tropes is indicative of our desire to feel young, to be a youth, again and again.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
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