What a perfect way to end the year. Pixar’s Soul released on Christmas Day. Other films that released on Christmas include Wonder Woman 1984, News of the World, and Promising Young Woman. But, Soul takes the cake as best movie, hands down no questions asked and I didn’t have to watch the other films to know this. Soul takes us on a journey of what living truly means with struggling musician and band teacher, Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) and infant soul, 22 (Tina Fey).
Disney’s plot summary via IMDB: “A musician who has lost his passion for music is transported out of his body and must find his way back with the help of an infant soul learning about herself”. There are many lessons and life changing takeaways from this film. The main thing I took from it was that our purposes in life isn’t our careers or our aspirations. It’s our relationships with each other, the moments of laughter, our toes in the sand on the beach, the wind and how it feels on our skin, the trees and leaves, the sky and how beautiful it is as the movie showed. Our careers and aspirations may lead us to our true purpose but the career/aspiration itself is not the purpose. This is something I came to realize years ago but seeing it in this film was so beautiful. Everything about the way the film got the message across was truly brilliant to say the least. There are so many moments in the film to be noted but my favorites I will list below.
- When Joes tells Dortheia Williams (Angela Basset) that he thought he’d feel different after playing with her which was a dream of his and her response. She tells him a story about a fish that was in the ocean but asked where the ocean was. The point being we are never satisfied, and why? Because our happiness is not about where we are.
2. When 22 realizes that her purpose was walking and looking at the sky. She basically found out that our purpose was living all along but Joe told her that she was wrong, that those were not real purposes. This leads 22 down dark hole of self pity. Because of Joe said 22 thinks she has no purpose and doesn’t deserve a human life. That leads me to another favorite scene of mine when Joe goes to save 22 and she swallows him and he sees himself as a monster inside of her mind telling her she has no purpose. It made me want to cry because it felt too familiar. We always beat ourselves up and tear ourselves down. The dark scary monster that self pity made 22 turn into was depression.
3. I forget which character says this but in the film they say “stop eating processed foods” repeatedly. This was a very clear and direct message to the audience and kind of scary to hear. If we want to live long happy lives we have to stop eating processed foods!
4. The end of the film when Joe saves 22’s soul and she gets to go down to Earth.
