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Scene from »Soul«: Searching for a purpose for life on earth
Photo:
- / dpa
When you hear the music of saxophonist John Coltrane, you think you recognize in the most virtuoso pieces a person who is looking for spiritual renewal with the means of his art.
The art of animated film is completely different from that of jazz improvisation: precise, technical, planned well in advance.
In the new film »Soul«, however, the virtuosos from Pixar have mastered their craft perfectly, so that the technical is forgotten here too.
It's about a jazz pianist - or rather: about the soul of a jazz pianist, and not that the film is not nice to watch, on the contrary: the light is even warmer, the movement of the camera and the figures even more fluid, the city of New York seems to be implemented even more tangibly than in previous films by director Pete Docter.
Hosts of animators have convincingly recreated reality and magically exaggerated it.
But this backdrop quickly fades behind the story, which radically breaks with everything that has hitherto been imagined among children's animation films.
It takes less than five minutes to sit in front of the screen in disbelief because pianist Joe Gardner (incidentally the first black main character in a Pixar film) suddenly falls into an open street drain and dies.
Stick figures who are all called Jerry
In the next moment he stands as a soul being at the gates of eternity.
But Joe definitely doesn't want to stay in the afterlife, after all, shortly before his unfortunate accident, he got a performance with the fictional saxophonist Dorothy Williams.
And hoped to finally leave his frustrating existence as a music teacher behind and make a career as a jazz musician.
Death is terribly inconvenient for him.
So Joe tries by all means to find his way back to earth.
He takes on all-powerful bureaucrats, stick figures who take care of things in the afterlife and are all called Jerry.
Eventually he ends up in a place where other souls are preparing for earth life.
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Light Being Joe, 22 in "Soul": Great Human Issues
Photo: Pixar / Disney
One of them, her name is 22, doesn't feel like it.
She feels quite comfortable as a being of light that floats through the area without feeling hunger, thirst or pain.
And above all, she simply cannot find the spark, the purpose to which she wants to dedicate her life on earth.
Abraham Lincoln or Mother Teresa - mentors in the hereafter - have tried in vain to give meaning to the path.
Joe doesn't succeed either, but by mistake the two end up on earth, in New York.
And experience adventures together.
Pete Docter has been working at Pixar since the beginning of his amazing career to redefine the limits of what is possible in a children's movie.
His debut "Die Monster AG" was immensely successful and wildly fabulous, but still played by the rules.
But already with "up" he let a disgruntled pensioner float on a cluster of balloons to South America.
"Everything is upside down" was an adventure film set in the emotional world of an eleven year old.
What is eternity
Due to the pandemic, his new film »Soul« will not start in the cinema, but on the Disney + streaming service.
This time, too, he addresses children and adults alike, but goes one step further and approaches the great questions of humanity: What is eternity?
What is the soul and, of course, what is the meaning of life?
The fact that there is a soul and not just biochemical processes in the brain is as clear to Docter and his co-authors as the glow of the little souls that they let float through their film.
They make use of various spiritual sources: The Buddhist idea of rebirth is a matter of course alongside the yogic idea of the crown chakra, the belief of Jews and Christians in eternal life alongside the European philosophy of spirit.
The message: Our existence is not a cosmic coincidence, but has meaning and meaning.
The big questions in "Soul" are game material from which the makers build a positive picture of the world and what holds it together.
The film thus goes further than many of its predecessors, in which the motif of the deceased, who cannot stand it in the afterlife and is allowed to go back to earth for a task, is usually smacky (“Ghost - Message from Sam”) or at best amusing (“Der Heaven shall wait «) was cannibalized.
In contrast, »Soul« is a maddeningly entertaining, deeply touching slapstick masterpiece that has more in common with the great silent film philosophers Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton than with the films of Pixar's parent company Disney.
What tends to slide into slippery sentimentality there is in »Soul« comedy with existential force.
So Joe has to experience that his lifelong dream of being a successful jazz musician is perhaps not as important as he always thought.
Instead, he learns that you don't need a purpose or even a purpose for a fulfilled life, and that you can find happiness without being useful and utilizable.
In the Protestant and capitalist world of Disney this is a downright revolutionary thought.
From December 25th on Disney +
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