Soul

All that's best in the world of Jazz... Niiiice


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Ellie

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So this is coming to Disney+ on Christmas Day with no price uplift other than the subscription, which I personally think is a good idea and should increase their subscriptions a lot in December.

I saw this today at the BFI for the LFF. Completely wonderful in every way and I don't want to spoil it as they did such a good job with the trailer not revealing much at all. Graham Norton voicing much more than just a cameo was just a bit distracting. Up there with Pixar's very best.
 
Looking forward to this.

Is it just a one-off showing on Disney+, or will it stay on for a while?
 
I think Mulan was an experiment, this is not as big (both in cost and in impact). It’s a shame that we’re losing it to streaming, I would have loved to watch it on a big screen.
 
What a lovely film, a heavy subject matter which doesn't get told to kids in a patronising way. Deserved the Oscars it received, the music is stunning.
 
Saw this tonight. TBH I was a bit put off by the art style in the adverts for this, I really hated the weird hall-of-mirror faces Pixar loves these days, and the creepy mad bird eyes.

Anyway I did sort of like this - I was going off on Pixar these days bashing you over the head with the message, Turning Red was a big turn-off for me. Coco was pretty decent, even if the characters were all pretty flat. Soul to some extent had a similar issue. I swear I've watched 4 or 5 recent big animated movies this month and they all have the same pattern:

  • Character has something they really want to do, but their family is staunchly unsupportive and aggressively discourages protagonist with family guilt
  • Character has some sort of crisis and pursues it anyway and discovers something
  • Family finds out and has an end of Act 2 schism with the character, with home truths coming out.
  • Character decides their family is more important at the same as the family accepts the character's differences

Literally this is the plot for Turning Red, Coco, Encanto and Soul. Soul is a BIT more subtle about it at least.

I hate jazz, that doesn't help - but the story got me onside when I realised it wasn't just a handjob/love letter to jazz, and the main character came over as a bit of a self-absorbed prick. In fact, although I'm sure it probably WAS secretly a handjob to jazz, the message I got was "Yeah live your jazz dream but it ain't shit, you'll still live a boring life when you aren't noodling".

My usual moans about distracting stunt-voice-casting (Graham Norton was a particular bizarre pick), I always enjoy movies more when I'm not distracted from the voice acting by the real-life actors.

But yeah, I think I liked it. It had a bit of Finding Dory vibes (I guess mostly down to Tina Fey's 22), and a sort of spiritual successor (no pun intended) to Inside Out. It was an interesting concept but could've done with a bit less exposition, but they can't help themselves "Here is the soul garden where you go in the twat tent to become a twat, the sociopath tent to get those traits, then whee through the portal to being born", I don't think it was as much of an abstract construct as they thought it was, it was like Monsters Inc for personalities.

It did give me the feeling of imperial period Pixar though, when each new movie had a radically different and interesting concept, before half the movies were sequels.

I think it could've ended a lot better if
they had just let him die at the end, that would've been much more powerful. He got his professional peak, the approval of his mother, and a sense of inner accomplishment and peace. I wonder if that was tried and didn't test well :rolleyes: - if they wanted to talk about souls, I feel they pussied out on the death side, in fact just made that look scarier.

Also if the cat's soul got sent to the great beyond, how did it come back to life?
 
Oop, it was on my list, I heard it was good and kind of gay 💅
At least until the director said NO NOT GAY STOP IT
I enjoyed it! But the plot path is very Pixar-predictable.
 

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