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Soul
The penultimate short-listed film for the Hugo Award this year, Soul is a Pixar film about Joe Gardner, a jazz pianist and teacher; and 22, a soul who is stuck in the Great Before. It's a beautifully-animated film with a great soundtrack and some very funny moments (and far too much cringe for my liking!). But I found the plot rang hollow (and its ontology(?) was very strange), and it dragged surprisingly for a relatively-short film.
There are a number of things that I thought were a bit off about the model of reality here. Everyone "in the zone" is by themself - even Joe, who vanishes off by himself while playing with the quartet, which is an oddly individualistic understanding of making music: a great performance is when we're in the zone together in the band, surely? The idea that one's personality is fixed before birth is pretty problematic, too - what does it mean if the narcissitic megalomaniac really was born that way? Are they thus blameless or simply beyond redemption? It feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it, too, with the whole spark/purpose thing, too: Joe gets his gig, it's brilliant and then he's very "is that it?" (OK, leaving open the question of whether his spark is in fact helping others to find theirs), but also the plot shows Connie finding her passion for the trombone as an important point.
The plot is not without holes, too - like what happens to the cat's soul? We see it on the escalator to the Great Beyond when Joe invades its body, so what's inside it when Joe is restored to his body and the cat bounds off to its owner? It also seemed odd to give Joe a "second chance" when the film to that point had in some sense been his second chance already; it would have been more in-character for him to decide to go into the Great Beyond at that point, I felt.
And the implied point that actually it's all about being in the moment and finding beauty in the fall of a sycamore seed is very Mindfullness, but rang hollow to me. Maybe the point is, in fact, "if only America had universal healthcare people could actually follow their dreams rather than being trapped by the need to get a job with health insurance"?
There are a number of things that I thought were a bit off about the model of reality here. Everyone "in the zone" is by themself - even Joe, who vanishes off by himself while playing with the quartet, which is an oddly individualistic understanding of making music: a great performance is when we're in the zone together in the band, surely? The idea that one's personality is fixed before birth is pretty problematic, too - what does it mean if the narcissitic megalomaniac really was born that way? Are they thus blameless or simply beyond redemption? It feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it, too, with the whole spark/purpose thing, too: Joe gets his gig, it's brilliant and then he's very "is that it?" (OK, leaving open the question of whether his spark is in fact helping others to find theirs), but also the plot shows Connie finding her passion for the trombone as an important point.
The plot is not without holes, too - like what happens to the cat's soul? We see it on the escalator to the Great Beyond when Joe invades its body, so what's inside it when Joe is restored to his body and the cat bounds off to its owner? It also seemed odd to give Joe a "second chance" when the film to that point had in some sense been his second chance already; it would have been more in-character for him to decide to go into the Great Beyond at that point, I felt.
And the implied point that actually it's all about being in the moment and finding beauty in the fall of a sycamore seed is very Mindfullness, but rang hollow to me. Maybe the point is, in fact, "if only America had universal healthcare people could actually follow their dreams rather than being trapped by the need to get a job with health insurance"?