Soul is the film where Pixar stopped asking what makes us feel and started asking why we exist. Pete Docter, who previously explored the inner workings of emotion in Inside Out, turned his attention to something even more abstract: the nature of purpose, the meaning of passion, and whether a life spent chasing a single dream might cause you to miss the life happening around you. It’s Pixar’s most grown-up film, and its target audience isn’t children so much as adults who’ve spent years defining themselves by what they do rather than who they are.
The response has been deeply appreciative but slightly complicated. Most viewers recognized Soul as one of Pixar’s most ambitious and beautiful films. The jazz sequences are breathtaking. The philosophy is handled with unusual maturity. But some felt the film’s structure, splitting between the real world and a metaphysical realm called the Great Before, created an unevenness that prevented the emotional impact from fully landing.
New York, Jazz, and the Texture of Being Alive
The film’s New York sequences are among the most beautiful things Pixar has ever animated. The city isn’t just a backdrop. It’s rendered with a warmth and specificity that makes every frame feel lived-in. Autumn light filtering through subway grates. The way a barber’s clippers move through hair. Pizza grease on a paper plate. Docter and his team committed to capturing the sensory details of ordinary life because the entire film is building toward the argument that those details are the point. By the time Joe Gardner walks through the city at the end and really sees it, possibly for the first time, those accumulated details pay off with devastating emotional force.
Jamie Foxx voices Joe with a specific, grounded warmth that anchors the film’s more abstract elements. Joe is a middle school band teacher who dreams of playing jazz professionally, and when he finally gets his shot to perform with the Dorothea Williams quartet, his excitement is infectious. Foxx captures both Joe’s passion for music and his blindness to everything else, the way a lifelong obsession can become a prison without you noticing.
Tina Fey’s 22 is the film’s comic engine and its philosophical counterpart. A soul in the Great Before who has resisted being born for thousands of years, 22 has had every great mentor in human history and remained unmoved by all of them. Her cynicism about life isn’t nihilism. It’s the defensive posture of someone terrified that existence won’t live up to its billing. When she accidentally experiences life on Earth through Joe’s body, her wonder at ordinary sensations, the taste of pizza, the feel of wind, the sound of a subway musician, provides the film’s most moving moments.
The jazz performances are extraordinary. Pixar worked with Jon Batiste to create original compositions that capture the ecstatic flow state of live jazz performance. The scenes where Joe loses himself in music, rendered as abstract visual experiences of color and shape, are among the most purely exhilarating sequences in animation history.
The Great Before’s Abstract Landscapes
The Great Before, the metaphysical realm where souls develop their personalities before being born, is beautifully designed but narratively uneven. The visual concept, a luminous space of soft geometric forms that suggests early childhood drawings, is stunning. The Counselors, all named Jerry, are entertaining in their pleasant bureaucratic detachment. But the rules of the Great Before shift to accommodate the plot in ways that can feel arbitrary, and the middle section of the film, where Joe mentors 22 in the hopes of stealing her Earth pass, drags compared to the vibrant New York sequences.
The body-swap element, where Joe’s soul ends up in a cat and 22 inhabits Joe’s body, provides comedy but introduces complications. Some viewers found the decision to have a Black character spend significant screen time as a cat, while a non-human entity walks around in his body, to be a choice that undermined the film’s representation. The film’s intentions are clearly positive, and the body-swap serves important narrative functions, but the optics created valid discussion.
The villain figure, a counting-obsessed bureaucrat named Terry, is the film’s weakest element. Terry’s pursuit of Joe’s lost soul generates some comedy but never real tension, and the character feels like an obligation to include conflict in a film that doesn’t naturally need a traditional antagonist.
The ending wraps up perhaps too neatly. After building toward genuinely challenging philosophical territory about purpose and existence, the resolution sidesteps some of its own hardest questions. The final moments are beautiful, but they arrive at a conclusion that feels slightly easier than the questions the film raised deserved.
Purpose Is a Trap Disguised as a Gift
Soul’s deepest insight is that passion can become obsession, and obsession can eat a life. Joe spent decades believing that playing jazz professionally would make his life meaningful, and when he achieves that dream, the first thing he asks is “what now?” The film suggests that the spark of life, the thing that makes a soul ready to be born, isn’t a purpose or a passion or a calling. It’s simply the desire to live. That’s a radical message in a culture that constantly asks “what’s your passion?” and treats the answer as the measure of a person’s worth.
Should You Watch Soul?
Adults will get the most from this film, particularly anyone who has ever wrestled with whether their career defines their identity. The jazz is gorgeous, the animation is among Pixar’s best, and the philosophical questions are genuinely worth sitting with. Younger children may enjoy the visual creativity and the comedy but will likely miss the deeper themes. If you need your animated films to maintain a consistent pace and tone, the shifts between New York realism and Great Before abstraction may frustrate you. But if you’re open to a film that treats its audience as thoughtful people capable of engaging with big ideas, Soul offers rewards that few animated films attempt.
The Verdict on Soul
Pete Docter pushed Pixar into its most ambitious territory and mostly succeeded. The New York sequences are gorgeous, the jazz is transcendent, and the film’s central question about what makes life worth living lands with quiet power. The Great Before sections don’t quite match the real-world material, and the plot mechanics occasionally get in the way of the philosophy. But Soul reaches for something most animated films don’t dare attempt, and even when its reach exceeds its grasp, the effort is beautiful.