Quickie Review: Soul

[Kevin M.]

Disney/Pixar has a propensity for including a death in the first act of their children’s movies that borders on the macabre. Also ironic that a movie centered in the world of jazz is NOT a musical. But otherwise a good flick.

On the Disney+

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[M-D November]

Not a single Pixar film to date has been a musical (those generally come from Walt Disney Animation Studios, although it’s really two sides of the same coin now). But there were some original jazz compositions and orchestrations by John Batiste. 

An argument could also be made that, save for the Cars franchise, most of Pixar’s output over the last decade+ haven’t really been “children’s movies”. (In the same sense that the original Looney Tunes shorts weren’t “for children”.)

[PGage]

So, I guess this raises the question of how many songs a film has to have to qualify as a musical; or is it some other criteria, like how integrated the songs are into the story telling of the film? Certainly many Pixar films have memorable original songs and scores. I have not seen Soul, but I think Kevin p’s comment holds even if not technically a musical, that it was an opportunity for a couple of fully developed jazz compositions or songs and a full jazz score at least as memorable as Toy Story or maybe Brave.

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[Jim Ellwanger]

In addition to the jazz music by Jon Batiste, which is the score that's heard during the portions of "Soul" that take place on Earth, there is also music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which is the score heard during the portions that take place in the "before-life."

It is true that there's no real point where the action stops for a full song (so, nothing along the lines of the weepy montage scene set to "When She Loved Me" in "Toy Story 2").

You can look at the track listing for the soundtrack album and see the lengths of the various compositions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_(soundtrack)

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[Kevin M.]

If you like the intro/outro styling of Batiste on Colbert, meaning you just want a few seconds of good piano riffing, then sure pick up the soundtrack. I just felt that if the Pixar movie Cars didn’t feature cars racing, someone would point out that it was a missed opportunity. So in Soul, a movie centered on a jazz musician, it feels lacking that we really don’t hear a jazz song. It wasn’t a bad movie (and I feel as if actresses whose agents send them out to audition for female jazz artists get depressed knowing it will inevitably go to Angela Bassett because she nails it each and every damn time), but it feels like it as either written or produced by someone who doesn’t actually like jazz.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/4BA17B9E-3C84-4F6C-862F-7225EED7024C%40ellwanger.tv.

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Kevin M.]

According to this article in The New Yorker, the movie was a racist modern minstrel show, with the “white” soul being dropped into the body of a black man.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/pixars-troubled-soul/amp

My own beliefs about the film’s shortcomings notwithstanding, I don’t think the folks at The New Yorker are correct. I think they are way off the mark. But what do I know?

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Kevin M. (RPCV)