Pixar's Soul: A Review and Commentary

Pixar’s first “black-led” movie ‘Soul’ isn’t about being black, it’s about being human

Pixar went to great lengths to make sure Soul would be acceptable to black people, but that won’t stop the woke from conjuring racial criticism of it.

Soul, the new film from esteemed animation studio Pixar that premiered on the streaming service Disney + on Christmas Day, has gotten a lot of attention for featuring the first black protagonist in Pixar’s history.

The film tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a good-hearted jazz musician (who happens to be black) making a living teaching music at a New York City middle school.

On the day Joe’s life is about to change following an audition with a famous saxophonist searching for a piano player, things end up taking an unanticipated twist.

What follows is a very existential and mildly entertaining metaphysical magical mystery tour through life, death, art and New York City. 

In this era of aggressive wokeness and cancel culture, Pixar and Disney went to great lengths to make sure Soul was not deemed racist and was acceptable to black people.

According to the New York Times, “Knowing their work would be minutely scrutinized, the director Pete Doctor, the co-screenwriter Mike Jones and the producer Dana Murray, who are white, set out to create a character who would be believably Black while avoiding the stereotypes of the past.”

So the question is how could these artists, who are members of a race (white) so despicable the New York Times refuses to capitalize it, believably create a character whose race (Black) is so superior that it is always capitalized in the New York Times?

As the Times informs us, the first step in this Herculean task was Pixar’s vice president for inclusion strategies Britta Wilson building a “Cultural Trust” made up of the company’s black employees.

The second step was that the production “talked to a lot of external consultants and black organizations...”

And finally the production brought in black writer Kemp Powers as a screenwriter who then got promoted to co-director, the first black director in Pixar history.

If all of that corporate pandering, from having a vice president of “inclusion strategies” to a “Cultural Trust” to hiring racial consultants, seems transparently ridiculous, repulsively shameless and downright griftery, you are not alone. But thankfully the film somewhat succeeds despite, as opposed to because of, all of this human resources inspired nonsense.

Ironically, the end result of all of Pixar’s gratuitous genuflecting to black people is a film that is strikingly color blind in a gloriously unwoke, old-fashioned and beautifully rational Martin Luther King-esque kind of way, as Joe’s race is actually entirely incidental to the story in Soul.

To the film’s great credit it doesn’t tell a black story, it tells a human story. Soul transcends race, or any of our other superficial differences like ethnicity and gender, and highlights the fact that we are not “white” people and “black” people, but rather, just people…all of us filled with hopes, fears, dreams and heartbreaks.

The funny thing though about Pixar being so scared of being called “racist” that it bent over backwards to make Soul acceptable to black people, is that it wasn’t black people it needed to be worried about…it was the woke.

Case in point, Kirsten Acuna, a non-black, woke film critic for the Insider, was deeply disturbed by Soul’s racial politics, so much so that the rather harmless film left her “cringing up until the very last minute”.

Acuna’s specific woke complaints contain too many spoilers to share in detail, but one of her non-spoiler issues was that “Pixar’s first Black-led film should celebrate a Black man’s experience and solely focus on his dreams and desires. Instead, Joe’s life takes a backseat in order for a white woman to figure out what she wanted from life.”

Contrary to Acuna’s complaint, there is actually no “white woman” character in the movie at all. Even though the alleged offending character, “22”, is voiced by white actress Tina Fey, a major premise of the movie is that “22” is a spiritual entity capable of taking any form.

Acuna was also dismayed that Soul has a 97% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, declaring that the majority of critics who have reviewed the movie are white, and “shouldn't at least half of the reviews for Pixar's first film with a Black lead come from critics of color?”

So if we studiously apply Ms. Acuna’s race-based test for film critics, then the obvious question becomes…why didn’t Ms. Acuna let a black critic write a review of Pixar’s first black-led film instead of writing one herself?

This is why wokeness is so insidious and why trying to appease it is a Sisyphean venture, because it is an inherently irrational, emotionally fueled exercise in grievance seeking and virtue signaling…case in point – the vacuous and vapid woke fools like Kirsten Acuna lamenting Soul’s allegedly troublesome racial politics.

As for my opinion, Soul wasn’t as great as I hoped it would be, but it also wasn’t bad. It’s an at times entertaining, thought provoking, visually gorgeous and interesting movie.

My biggest issue with Soul was that it wasn’t quite as philosophically profound as it could have been, but to my surprise and to its credit, it also wasn’t heavy-handed and politically preachy…and for that I was very grateful, and you should be too.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A mildly entertaining movie that takes a unique look at life, death and art. Not perfect by any stretch but compelling enough to keep you engaged.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020