Some films took a beating before then -- like my #1, I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- but only since I closed off my list a month ago have I become fully cognizant of the mixed response to Pixar's latest.
I'll get into the nature of that response later, though you are surely aware of it. Suffice it to say that I read none of the think pieces or heard none of the podcasts devoted to those concerns until after I'd already cemented for all time its place in my personal record books. This is not to suggest a person has to be swayed by think pieces or podcasts, but to disregard opposing viewpoints in one's analysis of a film is also pretty obtuse, and means you aren't really giving a favorite film the chance to weather the storm of reasonable criticism.
There were signs I should have seen, however, that I might myself have been more mixed on Soul than I thought I was, and definitely not as confident in it as a #4 year-end ranking might suggest. And it has to do with the ways I've written about it.
Specifically, I wrote more than a thousand words on Soul when I reviewed it for ReelGood, and don't feel at any point that I successfully described what I liked about it.
Any review that starts off this way is in trouble:
"When Disney lost the theatrical release of its 2020 tentpole Mulan to the pandemic, it scrambled to recoup losses by premiering the movie on Disney+ – but for a $30 rental price, even for the streaming service’s current subscribers. Less than three months after Mulan’s 27 March expected theatrical release, Pixar’s latest, Soul, had also been scheduled to debut. Instead of charging an arm and a leg to rent this one, Disney released it for free to subscribers on Christmas Day."
That's not a bad paragraph in and of itself, but it's not really talking about the movie, now is it?
And then I make matters worse by expending another hundred words (actually, 66) comparing a movie I'm not talking about with the movie I am, for little other reason than I had to continue the review as I'd already started it.
The change in strategy may have been learning the new pandemic landscape, or it may just have been a gross miscalculation of the respective quality of the two films. Though we’re certainly glad we didn’t have to pay $30 to watch the latest absolute gem from Pixar, it would have been worth $60 when measured against yet another perfunctory live-action remake of the studio’s animated IP.
The fact that I didn't start talking about Soul proper until the third paragraph suggests I was stalling, doesn't it? It may not have seemed that way at the time to me, but if a writer feels hesitantly about the thing they are writing about, it comes through. That's not the same as feeling mixed on it. You can write confidently while both liking and disliking things about a movie. No, I think this kind of dilly-dallying comes from being not sure, at a deeper level, whether the opinion you're about to espouse is actually correct.
I won't keep excperting from the review, but I will tell you that there's a fair bit of plot synopsis, comments on what you might call "surface elements" (the appearance, the voice acting, the score), and not very much about what the movie is about. I think Soul is about a lot, some of it very good, some of it a bit muddled. But when you don't really talk about those things in a review, it's a problem.
The whole review is here if you want to see for yourself.
I don't look back proudly on every review I write, of course, but I do generally like the reviews I write about movies I love. Great movies almost always inspire me to at least one of elegant turn of phrase, some expression of my enthusiasm that is exactly what I mean to say. That never happened in my Soul review, perhaps because deep down, I was papering over flaws that I did not want to see.
I had another chance to write about Soul in my year-end post, in which I spend about 250 words blurbing on each of my top ten movies. Again I whiffed on Soul. I spent time talking about trivial, statistics-minded observations like this being Pete Docter's second time making my top ten after Inside Out, and Pixar landing two movies in my top ten. In fact, the number of times I've compared Soul to Inside Out should have revealed to me my reservations about it as a unique creative triumph for Pixar.
It's easy to see why my judgment was a bit clouded on Soul. I've mentioned it a couple times before. We watched it on New Year's Day, my son's seventh birthday, projected on the wall of the hotel where we were staying, with both his aunt and his grandmother in attendance. It was a triumphant execution of a perfectly conceived birthday surprise, and my son told me it was his favorite part of the trip. I was in a "good dad glow" as I watched it, and those enthralling surface elements -- like the appearance and the score -- made it easy to maintain that high.
But people have had a lot of legitimate complaints about Soul, and it's not just the racial ones. Though those are probably the most damning. Although the ways Soul is tone deaf are not, I think, as bad as the movie's most strident critics have portrayed them to be, you can't escape the fact there's something a little off about the way the movie's racial politics play. I do see a few of the blackface criticisms in the body swapping plot, and it doesn't matter if you can explain them away with unassailable talking points. (Like the fact that Kemp Powers was brought in to rework the script and gets a co-director credit.) What matters is the feel it has, and I agree, it is not always exactly the right feel.
I won't get deeper into the ways some Black audiences are put off by the movie, because there are plenty of places you can find whole pieces on that. I will say that none of these points sounded off base to me, and they have no doubt contributed to a shift in my perspective on the film.
But then there are more basic issues about the world, its rules, the way the story is structured, the ultimate message, and even the appearance of the film -- the part that shouldn't prompt any complaints from the world's most accomplished purveyor of computer animation -- that have been put out there. I heard one person say the ways the Great Before and the Great Beyond were envisioned were not particularly surprising, outside of the Picasso-like creatures that run the place, whom everyone seems to love. There are questions as to whose story this is, and whether the movie gets taken away from Pixar's first Black protagonist by a white woman (well, the voice of one anyway). Oops, I guess I said I wouldn't delve too much more into the racial stuff.
I think I really started to question by own enthusiasm -- don't forget, I gave the film a near-perfect 9/10, which translates to 4.5 stars out of 5 -- not because of the podcasters or think pieces, but when a friend of mine said: "Even if I saw only ten films this year, Soul wouldn't be in my top ten."
That comment really struck me because this guy is a huge Pixar fan, and fan of animation in general. His comment was a response to my placement of Soul within my top ten, so that was the inspiration for this particular phrasing, but he wouldn't have said it unless he really wanted to indicate how much the movie had failed him.
What this all means is not that I don't like Soul anymore, or even that I don't love it. I might still love it. And that's where a second viewing will come in.
Not now, maybe not even soon. But sometime, when I'm not being biased by the look of exquisite joy on my son's face, I will need to wrestle with this movie again, given all I know about how other people feel about it.
I guess with Pixar, I get this feeling that if they are really going for something and mostly succeeding, it's a home run. Pixar usually has ambition on its side, and ambitious projects have served the studio well in the past. Even if it's a near miss, a Pixar near miss is another studio's home run. I feel like I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt than I would be for others, because I'm so in the bag for the majority of their work.
A #4 year-end ranking is elevated enough for a film to warrant consideration among the best of the decade. Fortunately, we're a long ways off from that. I'll have ample time in the next nine years to figure out how good Soul really is. Maybe if I do confirm my initial feelings, at last I'll be able to write something profound about it.
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