Where do your passion, your vocation, your aspirations come from? Joe Gardner – a high school music teacher – is not clear. What he is clear about is his desire to be a professional pianist in a jazz band. After years of teaching hyperactive and uninterested children, he receives the opportunity to be part of one of the city’s biggest bands.
Of course, after one misstep, Joe – horn-rimmed glasses, pleated pants, irresistible vitality – will go from walking through the hyper-realistic streets of New York to floating in the Beyond, an immaterial existential plane, where the new souls – stains. phosphorescent yet unborn – acquire their personality thanks to their cubist-looking mentors. To return to Earth, Joe will have to teach a soul without defined passion – called 22 – the meaning of life.
Directed by Pete Docter (Inside Out, Up) and co-directed by Kemp Powers (Spiderman: Crossing the Multiverse), Soul, previously released on Disney Plus, – can we consider that a premiere? – was awarded the 2021 Oscar for Best Animated Film. Four years later, it receives, like its protagonist, a second chance and is released for the first time on the big screen.
The film, according to Docter, was born 23 years ago, at the same time as his son. “The moment you were born you already had a personality. Where did that come from? I thought that personality developed throughout our lives as a result of our interactions with the world. However, it became more than clear that we are all born with a very unique and specific sense of who we are,” he reflects.
Soul, reminiscent at times of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s A Life or Death, revolves around learning to live, something that goes through us all and can be learned anywhere or at any time according to Docter. “I remember riding my bike one day and stopping to pick wild raspberries. When I ate them, warmed by the sun, they were the best raspberries I have ever eaten. I remember that simple moment very vividly,” he says.
Without fear of jazzy imperfection, à la Ronald Searle, and casual in addressing the transcendental, à la Hayao Miyazaki, Soul serves us, with the brilliance of a Pixar in a state of grace, a delicate reflection on finding our “spark.” Reflection that comes to say something like: It is not about discovering your purpose, hobby, vocation or meaning in life, it means, in the language of contemporary mysticism, being present.
A film that is a cocktail (without alcohol) suitable for children, but not childish, served to the rhythm of jazz, by the award-winning musician Jon Batiste, and spiritual electronica, by the also award-winning composers Trenz Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Footnote: Leaves a big hangover. Symptoms? A vitalism capable of giving second chances and making any moment something transcendental that defines why we have come to this life, like that maple seed in the middle of Manhattan or that wild raspberry warmed by the spring sun.
