The latest Pixar animated feature streaming on Disney+, Soul follows Joe, middle-aged band teacher and aspiring jazz pianist, who travels into the afterlife and back again after unexpectedly dying on the eve of his shot at the musical big time.
Strange, endearing, and visually beautiful, the film offers a fanciful, light-hearted foray into what often can be frightening metaphysical territory.
It is probably worth noting straightaway that this is probably not a film for the sort of Christian who balks, for instance, at the sorcery in Harry Potter. Viewers looking for an unmixed, meticulously accurate representation of what Catholics believe about life after death will certainly not find it here.
Throwing together a metaphysical grab bag of religiously unaffiliated good vibes, the closest things get to a recognizable real-world spirituality is one minor character’s hippy-style meditation-cum-astrology. It is clearly meant to be silly, even if it also borders once or twice upon irreverent: sensitive viewers with a special devotion to Saint Teresa of Calcutta, for example, may take offence at her brief representation in roughshod caricature.
However, a somewhat thicker-skinned, more agile approach to the movie might enable viewers to discern underneath all this something in the feel of the film that resonates with Christian expectation. In particular, despite its packaging in ridiculous, throwaway metaphysics, Soul does succeed in conveying a sense that what awaits us on the other side of the great divide is something good.
In his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis recounts how he walked away from his youthful reading of the modern fairy tale Phantastes with a distinct, life-altering impression of the possibility of death as something good. This “bright shadow,” he writes,baptized his imagination and aroused in him a desire and hope he would later discover answered by Christian faith.
In a similar vein, one of the principal strengths of Soul is probably how it entertains a perspective on life after death in tones that are overwhelmingly upbeat. Benevolent, pleasant, and injury-free, the land of the departed on this showing is a place where the hard fact of death is something with which one, at a minimum, might learn to relax.
Like a videogame world of limitlessly rebooting marshmallow Marios, the edgeless contours and pastel colouration of Soul’s Great Beyond seem deliberately constructed to cool some of those inflamed anxieties and abject terrors that motivate many persons to avoid thinking about such things altogether.
And this kind of slowed-down, deep-breath reconsideration of big questions is very much at the heart of the film.
Spoiler alert, as Joe struggles to resume his life cut short at the very moment of realizing its goals, he comes to realize that no single interest, ability, or accomplishment really suffices to define the value of a life. Somehow, rather, he sees it is all of life’s aspects taken together – just being – that makes living worthwhile.
In other words, it is good to be alive, even if it is hard to pin down exactly why – which offers a good summary of the Christian doctrine of creation, as well as what might be called the spirit of the Sabbath.
It is this encouraging, unfocused affirmation of mere living that lingers after the credits roll, and it is this – after discarding some of its pseudo-religious silliness – that makes Soul probably worth the watch.
This may be especially true for those of us who could use an instructive refresher in what it means to rest a little and just be – which is perhaps one of the key lessons we are all meant to learn from life in these extraordinary times.