The prologue culminates with Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) falling into an open sewer and ending up in a coma in the hospital. It's the end of a disappointingly good day when Joe finally gets a job as a staff member at his school and then joins forces with a visiting jazz legend named Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). The character auditioned, and he invited him to play with her that night soul review. After his near-fatal fall, Joe's soul was sent to the Great Beyond, basically a cosmic corridor with long walkways where the souls lined up before making their way to the White Light. Joe wasn't ready for The End, so he fled in the other direction, falling off the runway and ending up in a colorful but still purgatory area known as The Great Before.
The Great Before is kind of like the setting for Albert Brooks' metaphysical comedy "Defending Your Life." It has its own rules and procedures and is part of a larger spiritual ecosystem in which certain things have to happen for other things to happen. There are hints of video game structure/plot throughout the premise, and are supported by stylized drawings of Overwatch characters on top of Mentors and Primal Souls: they are deformed 2D Cubist figures made of smooth lines. neon sign
This is what happens when someone goes to Earth looking for Joe. A character knew he was trying to cheat death, mistaking another black man for Joe, and traumatizing him. Being mistaken for another black man just because they are the same race is a common microaggression.
Yes, I know Pixar hired a group of experts and added the talented Kemp Powers ("Miami Nights") as writer and co-director in post-production on this film. Maybe when Pixar went too far with thematic material, they turned to a black director. (Bowles told reporters that he joined the film when it was "pretty rough.")
There's a gorgeously animated scene that perfectly captures the feeling of being lost in the area that artists, musicians, and writers can feel more deeply, and when you're in a passion, everything else fades away.
There are rules in this field, reminiscent of Docter's deft translation of the concept of human emotion into clean cartoon terms "from the inside out." New souls emerge here and are guided by mentors who have lived and seem eager to pass on their passions to the next generation. Once new souls have discovered their "spark", they are given a pass into Earth, where they may be assigned a baby body. (This is a more complicated explanation of where the baby came from than the stork in "Dumbo" or Pixar's "Cloudy" short.)
That's where Docter's groundbreaking theory about where people get their individuality comes in: some components are printed in "You Seminary" (another, more corporate-sounding name for Great Before), while others are in old age Found with some helpful guidance from people. Soul The model isn't perfect, but it does some great work in encouraging kids to identify the things in life that excite them. As you can imagine, "Soul" sparked the first "Eureka" moment in some viewers. Still, the film seems more suited to an adult audience, like Capra's "Life is Beautiful" or Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," with a little bit of life experience that resonates differently.
Joe wants to go back to a body that is (as we know) still on life support. But he's mistaken for a mentor and randomly assigned to "soulmate," No. 22 (Tina Fey), a misfit who's been around for a long time and seems completely content to never "have a life." In fact, 22 prefers him before the great, countless more successful mentors than Joe, from Abraham Lincoln to Mother Teresa, have tried (unsuccessfully) to find their spark. But the supervisor, three classic UPA-style line drawings (Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, and Wes Studi), each named Jerry, were cool enough to let these two try, and before long, they found a loophole.
