Soul
Pixar’s “Soul” Will Make You Have The Most Heartwarming Existential Crisis Ever.
Joe Gardner, Voiced by the amazing Jamie Foxx
Before any talk about Pixar’s “Soul” movie, let’s revisit a small scene in breaking bad to remind you, the reader, just how important your soul is. And I know, using a Meth dealing show to elaborate on a children’s film about existentialism sounds impossible, but bear with me.
In the third episode of Breaking Bad, we are faced with a rather eye opening scene that makes us really wonder what we are made up of. It begins with a young Walter White, our protagonist, with a girl in an empty classroom. They’re adding up the percentages of each element that makes up the human body. Those measurements are as listed:
So boom, Hydrogen: 63 percent. Oxygen: 26 percent. (There you have your water.) Carbon: 9 percent. Nitrogen: 1.25 percent. Calcium is only .25 percent, even with our whole skeleton to account for. Iron: .00004 percent. You can’t have hemoglobin without iron, right? Well, apparently it don’t take much. Sodium: .04. Phosphorus: .19 percent.
Add up all these percentages and you’re left with 99.888042 percent, .111958 percent shy of 100.
He quickly says “There’s got to be more to a human being than that.” And the young girl ask “ What about the soul?”.
Kind of a funky analogy, but even scientifically, it’s pretty clear that a soul is lingering inside of us and weighing in at a whomping .111958 percent of the human body, it completes us.
Forgive me for my rant, I promise it was worth it.
Pixar’s “Soul” is the heart warming reminder to be kind to yourself and live life to the fullest.
We spend all our lives keeping up with our emotional maintenance but the existential crisis Pixar dares us to question is “Do you check in with your souls feelings?”. This story takes place in the greater area of New York City (Queens and Manhattan mostly) where people don’t often have time to check in with their personal feelings because the city is always alive and moving.
Our story starts off with Joe Gardner, a middle school jazz band teacher who wants nothing more but to be noticed as a professional Jazz musician. Day in and Day out, Joe teaches jazz to unappreciative students until one day, a former student calls him to play in a gig with the famous Dorothea Williams. Once he shows her he’s got what it takes and gets the gig, Joe runs off excited into the streets of New York on the phone boasting about his new opportunity to trash stardom. As he trots through various tribulations the city has to offer such as incoming traffic and construction sites, Joe carelessly falls into a manhole where he becomes a soul and enters “The great beyond”.
This out-of-body experience allows Joe to question the meaning of life and grants him the access to see where souls come from while figuring out his purpose on earth. Along the way our charismatic protagonist meets his friend that will accompany him on this journey, 22, a care free soul, challenges his ideologies about life and what it’s all about. As the two contradict one another constantly, they dive into the great beyond to help Joe Gardner get back to his body before it’s too late for his new found opportunity.
Soul is probably the most attentive to detail Pixar film I have seen in a very long time. Being from Queens within NYC, I felt I was a passerby stalking the animated world Joe Gardner. Even down to the style, much like his former student Curly (who is bald by the way), sporting Air Jordan 1s with some skinny jeans and a black Shirt (all he’s missing is a fitted honestly). Dorothea Williams hair in the movie really took me by surprise showing the definition of her curls, kudos to Pixar for not going with some squiggly lines for hair and really honing in on black culture and defining our looks ❤️. This movie carries everything about NYC that we love such as pizza, angry subway riders, the love/hate relationship for the Knicks, and much more you should dare to explore while watching this amazing film. And let’s not forget the safest place on earth as a black man, the barbershop. The scene where Joe really needs an emergency haircut enraptures every beautiful comforting thing about going to the barbershop and finding a place to speak your mind while also being humored by your surroundings as well, there’s no telling what can be said in a barbershop and Soul justifies every second of it.
Aside from small things that bothered me as a film fanatic like how the story was choppy in a sense of Joe Gardner’s journey to being a soul and his flashbacks and the eerie strange editing as he transfers from the living world to the great beyond ( which can be justified as a strange, eerie path), soul was an amazing movie. Soul reminds you of the feeling you get when you hug an old friend you haven’t seen in years, but this old friend is actually that dream you strive for that you almost forgot about. A great reminder that we seek out ways to make us feel alive when really all along we are alive and living the dream. Soul feels out an 8.5/10 but the love for Jazz music and Joe Gardner being from Queens makes me bias giving it a 9/10. And remember, when you’re watching this movie, you’re jazzing!
And by the way, Soul is based around a Music Teacher from Queens,NY. Queens get the money as usual.
