My Weird Beef with Soul Criticism

at the end of a truly trying year in december of 2020 we were blessed with one of the most beautiful soul lifting films about personal transformation and coming to terms with how you want to live your life that serves as an inspiration for the possibilities and future of animation that hardly anybody saw because despite the fact that in any other year this would have been in maybe a hundred theaters nationwide and not be available to most of the public for several months this one is already widely available at the fraction of the price of a single theater ticket but it's on a streaming service people don't already have so i guess there's nothing to be done about that okay seriously i do know that people don't like even really positive earnest recommendations that come in the form of pressuring or shaming people for not watching something and in fact can make some feel resentful of the recommendation and wolf walkers does not deserve that i just wanted to point out the ridiculousness of some of these excuses i know that streaming services are piling up right now but still compare that to what you would pay for even going out to one movie anyways to be radically different from every other review soul is indeed an amazing film conceptually fascinating emotionally resonant and technically and aesthetically stunning from the detailed realism of a lived-in new york neighborhood to the depiction of the spiritual experience of being engulfed in your passion to the ethereal before afterlife which might not have the same level of distinct personality and design as inside out but then you see they have these god counselor deity things that were designed based on these abstract wire sculptures but the way that they integrated them into the 3d space oh my god they're so pretty but contrary to its initial impression that this movie kills but not really its protagonist in the first five minutes seoul isn't really about death soul is about life and soul continues pete doctor's trademark to push for stories that aim to be both highly emotionally resident thought-provoking and just a little bit more narratively deep than other family films tend to try but to do something a little bit different to further my slightly spoilerish takes on the film regarding its story impact and legacy and also because everyone else has already seen and reviewed it by now i'm going to frame my further thoughts in the context of two major points that come up in other people's reviews and the first one might seem like a bit of an odd bone to pick considering but the constant clarification that soul is not a kid's movie now i know what people mean by this not the kids can't or won't enjoy it but merely that they might not fully comprehend the film's themes and questions posed and merely that it is just not exceedingly exciting or funny in that it literally does not fart glitter in your face i get it and it's not incorrect but i just keep finding it odd that everyone makes a note of this first of all it's already like a really gross oversimplification that we keep on labeling things as kid appropriate when we tend to label kids as pretty much anything below a teenager which means that that is 12 years where a human being goes through the most mental and emotional development and what is appropriate for one child at one age is going to be very different from even just the next year but i know that when we say that we just tend to mean is it safe for three year olds but even just the idea of needing to make a note of this movie is going to include ideas and concepts that may be more meaningful when you've got a little bit more life experience under your belt and can actually understand what's going on i mean isn't that like most kids movies especially pixar films like yep i'm totally sure that children under six totally related to the midlife crisis amidst the non-iranian debates about exceptionalism not to mention how many kids movies somehow have to do with like business buyouts but more likely it's slightly less about the themes than it is about the lack of easily branded child entertainment draws like talking animals and inanimate objects or superheroes in fact the pixar movie that's probably closest to this tonally is probably ratatouille also considered unusual for being pretty light on comedy with a fairly realistic setting with a lot of dialogue heavy scenes and ends with a speech about criticism but its main character characters are talking rat so that's all we need heck cars 3 is actually a pretty solemn film about mentors and retirement but it's got talking cars so whereas souls looks much less child appealing because it stars a middle-aged man i mean so does incredibles but whatever still if you want to talk about the child entertainment draws souls definitely still has those between the chibi soul designs and the entire middle act that includes a body swap many instances of flailing physical antics and a talking cat well we matched our child quota we got a talking animal in there but one that ultimately couldn't be put into the advertising because unlike pretty much everyone else pixar cares about keeping its story a secret until you actually see it and even given that soul still confines itself to a fairly recognizable format being a story that's ultimately about passion which pixar has definitely done before and whose conflict involves both a ticking clock and a pursuing antagonist which is already more standard than ratatouille and honestly soul is way funnier i know this seems like a weird thing to fixate on and i totally get what people mean by this i know because of the lack of comedy that this probably isn't going to end up being a lot of children's favorite film and i know not just because of what it talks about but the way it talks about it is going to make it much more relatable to older audiences in fact i have a pretty solid hypothesis that watching seoul is going to become a standard graduation ritual still i think the tendency to declare this not for kids just because it's not as bombastic or colorful as funny as other mainstream entries is still valid if you're only looking at it as a child-oriented comedy but has a child-oriented character drama i think that it's potentially more relatable than the subjects of a lot of other family films for one that it actually has an active child-coded co-protagonist something i've wondered multiple times why there aren't more of these in family films and yeah i know that child actors can be difficult when it comes to live action but why aren't they more prevalent animated ones i mean easy answer children aren't writing the scripts and i think that because a lot of older audiences are so connected to joe's journey that they underestimate 22's journey of self-discovery which is pretty much your entire life as a child you're constantly trying to figure out what this crazy world is that you've been born into and your place in it plus while the entire concept of what you're gonna do with your life doesn't have the same you know pressure to figure it out instantly in the same way that a teenager or an adult might the question of what do they want to be when they grow up is a very frequent question pros to them and one that they are almost constantly thinking about their future when children do pretend play this is literally them running simulations on how they think life works that kids are trying to figure out the right way to properly be people is a massive part of what 22's going through however specifically 22 is the problem child of this prenatal spiritual education setting but also with the limitations that that would imply 22 is someone to whom the normal system has failed until she gets some literal real world experience but before then she becomes the typical sardonic adolescent usually internalized by the young and dumb as somebody cool because they play by their own rules already have everything figured out and that means that they can just slack off and gets one over on the authorities and i don't need school man but as is usually revealed in the good stories as a troubled individual that uses sarcasm and frequently manufactured self-serving philosophies to hide their insecurities in this case exacerbated by all of their mentors being composed of literally the greatest minds and most accomplished people in world history and ergo never feels like they're going to be that same level of accomplished or special especially since they haven't been able to meet the bare minimum of acceptable so why bother trying and can we get a shout out for framing something as a brush off joke in the first act that turns into something incredibly serious and traumatizing in the climax at the same time letting parents know how their slight even forgettable comments can drastically affect their children and sure the arc about what it takes to be a good mentor is certainly an underplayed part of joe's journey but i find this potentially meaningful especially to young kids who are also going through their own education with similar kinds of intimidation we do have a system where if a child doesn't hit certain developmental milestone or obtain certain abilities within a time stream to the liking of all of the adults around them that they don't get to move forward to the next level of being a person and are if indirectly deemed a failure in the context of 22 being held in comparison to figures meant to be extraordinary which does connect to joe's story about what he thinks it means to have a worthwhile life because it's not merely about just being able to do the thing you want because if it was literally just about playing jazz he can do that whenever it's that he needs to accomplish something in order for his life to have meaning and that is a feeling that literally everybody struggles with and kids definitely not less so even when i was young and i was just comparing myself to child stars there was this depressing sense that i was less because i was at so and so age but i wasn't a renowned singer or actor on the disney channel but this is the age of social media where it is practically now a daily ritual to go online and find thousands of individuals in your vicinity and age group that are constantly being shoved in your face on how much more they've accomplished than you and your self-worth and global importance is literally quantified and then soul says no you do not need to be extraordinary you don't need to prove yourself because life is about more than what you can just accomplish soul isn't just the anti-cutie mark movie it is the anti-chosen one movie because for as much as that story gives its readers a fun power fantasy it inevitably encourages the idea that your worth is how individually powerful you are or how influential you are or how much you single-handedly can affect the world but no you don't need to be exceptional you are worthwhile just because you are alive having dreams is definitely a big part of life as well as having goals and just for doing the things that make you happy barring a sensible moral code and even then what about death i mean this is hardly the first time that a kid's movie has talked about it and in this context way less depressing than many of them but again i think that people underestimate that this is a thing on kids minds kids comprehend the idea of death pretty young at some other point usually between the ages of four and literally any time is the moment where it really hits them that death is a thing that will happen to them i had a period of time somewhere if 7 8 9 where i could not stop thinking not just about what would happen after i died but what was i before i was born what was the moment where i suddenly came into consciousness now as i said despite its advertising soul isn't really about that even though i think that was probably the original plan for this film soul is not about death soul is about life and that brings me to the second point which is of course the ending for the most part soul has been extremely well received all around character story script and almost unanimously the barber scene and the piano montage are the highlights as well as moon wind moon wind is incredible but the big divide or the mark that makes this just under other pixar classics regards the ending whether it's too vague whether joe should have died whether it should have been more should we have gotten an epilogue and honestly this dissension makes perfect sense considering that the creators themselves went through so many potential endings that included all of those including what happened to david's character i definitely get that leaving it open-ended is not very satisfying but i agree with the general idea of the ending in terms of how it relates to the film both in terms of its inconclusiveness and letting joe live granted if you were making the case for which one of these made the most sense in terms of the movie's own internal logic then sure joe dying makes the most sense only because of the incredibly arbitrary way in which the earth pass works but i support him living for pretty much the reason that i've said soul is not about death soul is about life the point of the film is that it wants to inspire people to live life this wouldn't necessarily have been completely undone if they had chose to let joe die but it does put a little bit of a damper on it because the inspiration to keep living isn't quite the same if it's also coupled with yeah but it's okay if you just die tomorrow what i'm not completely thrilled with is the way it happens i mean it's just this very quick tacked on simplistic literal deus ex machina yes it clearly would have been more satisfying if it had happened in a way that confirmed with the rest of the movie's logic or natural consequences but as a lot of people have said even if you have an issue with it it doesn't undo what makes soul great it's suitable it's just not impressive and in terms of its lack of epilogue i get that this is particularly aggravating did joe go back to playing jazz or maybe he discovered that teaching was more fulfilling or was it some combination or perhaps even a completely different third thing or my favorite since he knows how to do the entire great before inspiration meditation thing maybe he's the first living mentor maybe the souls literally use his body as a trial run but yeah then how does he do that and literally not end up in a loony bin it is frustrating because it is instinctively contradictory to how we're used to watching films where we usually see our protagonists have an objective see them achieve that objective and then it's over and the assumption is that all of their problems were solved and they were just happy for the rest of their lives but giving us a definitive answer into what our characters ended up doing for their happy ending not definitively but could be seen as undermining the major theme of the film because a would convey that they ultimately were destined to do something specific and that that choice was ultimately the key to their eternal happiness and b even if you achieve your objective as joe does you are in fact not going to be rewarded with an eternity of emotional orgasms because even after you've achieved a goal there's still life after that the other detour that it takes from expectations is how this movie in many ways follows the path of similar films of the self-absorbed adult who gets charmed by a child which teaches them humility and as a result they decided i'm going to throw away my lifelong dream and or that promotion to become a teacher or a coach because this is my true calling you know mighty ducks and i'm super glad they did not do this not only because again the entire point of this film is that there is no true calling but i'm also just kind of over the way that movies fetishize the joys of teaching like teachers aren't paid in child smiles guys you can't just compensate all of the other crap they have to go through just by constantly telling them how awesome they are and yeah maybe you figured out partially why i'm not a teacher anymore and no i don't believe that every single teacher feels the same way about that still the insinuation that joe didn't feel complete after joining the band is not necessarily because he found teaching more fulfilling it was merely that he had just hyped up this moment in his mind so much that it got to the point where reality couldn't compete with it then ultimately that tunnel vision in pursuit of his goal just made it harder for him to enjoy other potential meaningful life experiences like getting to know his totally awesome barber and of course it doesn't mean that he completely hated teaching but a side effect of the tunnel vision meant that he was only able to see teaching as a an outlet for his actual passion but also be a roadblock to actually achieving that dream and then him going back to 22 again is not confirmation that being a mentor is the right choice for him it's literally just him fixing a mistake that he helped cause it's just him being a better person than he was at the start of the film and yeah of course of my mind i like the idea that he ultimately did a little bit of everything but ultimately i think the movie's ending decision if imperfectly conveyed is the right choice and it's true that it could have gone deeper into this topic and debunked other misconceptions of life worth like fame and social media to the amount of people that you've positively influenced but it holds back on that typical conversation because that would still be implying that there's a right way to live life whereas the entire point of this film is that there isn't but i know that the ending's not the only issue seoul is definitely one of those movies where it is very easy to nitpick how this world works the one thing i wasn't crazy about was the personality pavilions i get that it's just a matter of whether it's your take on personality being a nature versus nurture but i'd still feel better about it if the counselors don't themselves tell the souls into which pavilion to go to but it's true that that might be kind of the point as the depiction the before life is the limitations and the processing of a systematic education but then things like what about the cat well the easy explanation is that cats have nine lives but even then that's still unfair it didn't do anything but help patients in a hospital oh yeah and what about his injuries and do you expect me to believe that out of all of the history of the world where people have frequently died very suddenly this is the first time anyone ran away from the big escalator in the sky because they weren't ready or they jumped off or they fell off and is terry's counting job actually important because nobody else seems to care but like with any of these movies those minor issues only matter as much as you care and to so many the topics and the positive takeaway and the feelings you come away this movie with in addition to the art and the character and the dialogue and the music ultimately makes the experience more fulfilling than just fixating on those minor issues it truly is a fantastic film and it's just a matter of where it's gonna end up on everyone's pixar ranking

Channel: CellSpex

Views: 492,953

Rating: 4.9387941 out of 5

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Id: d88tGutHv8c

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/IsaiahLilBear]

Odd place to put this video but, okay.