Thoughts on Disney Pixar's Soul
Anyone like me who missed the movie soul cause it went straight to streaming during the pandemic, please take a moment to watch it because it's a master piece.
The art style is a beautiful mix of hyper realistic rendering and cartoon caricature and the intentionality of when it leans more into either style says a story of its own. The first things I noticed were the musical instruments rendered in way more detail than necessary, the pictures in his class of real people and not caricatures.
Then it was the perspective shots of 22 experiencing life, where the art was again, all hyper realism. The overwhelming nature of nyc to the beautiful moment of them feeling the spark of life. And in those moments despite the realism, it was not new york I saw. I blinked and I was transported to all the moments in my own life that paralleled that moment and I remembered the cold breeze on my skin, the smell of rain on cement, the context of my memories that made me feel that spark of life.
And when Joe laid out the trinkets they had gathered as proof of living that day and started playing the piano, as he went through his own memories, his proof of living his whole life, I sobbed. Once again, with every blink I saw my own life and every memory and emotion proof that I have lived. The score he played truly felt like it represented the feeling of being alive. Being alive through all the pain and joy and excitement and despair, a feeling so human.
What's insane about this is that I'm not from NYC, I don't take the subway to work, I have nothing to do with music or jazz. None of those moments or memories are directly relatable to my life. And yet I feel it represented my life.
The movie itself was a piece of art of course but watching it, the emotions it invoked in me felt like a separate multimodal artistic experience. One so deeply personal, I cannot express it to you in words.
Please go watch it for yourselves. If you watched it when you were younger and are now a full adult, please watch it again.
(I could go on about how perfect jazz is as a metaphor for life but I'm not the most qualified for that. If anyone is, please do talk about it)
