‘Soul’ Duo Says Pixar Movie Is “Investigation Into What’s Really Going On In Life” – Contenders Film

Oscar-winning director Pete Docter shared that the idea behind Soul, his latest Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar animated film, came from his own self-reflection.

“I was at a point in my life where I started to question, OK I’ve always been taught — everybody I think has — to follow your passion, do what you love and that will lead to ultimate joy and satisfaction,” he says during the film’s presentation at Deadline’s virtual Contenders Film awards-season event. “There is nothing wrong with following your passion — I think it does lead to great joy. But for me, it wasn’t leading to this sense of everything is figured out in my life.”

In Soul, Jamie Foxx voices the lead character Joe Gardner, an aspiring jazz musician who gets the break of a lifetime, but through a twist of cosmic forces finds himself transported out of his body and to the place where souls are created. With the help of a new soul there, he must find his way back to his body on Earth, and both learn a lot more about what living on Earth is all about.

The choice to made Joe a jazz musician served a greater purpose within the film’s existential themes, co-director and co-writer Kemp Powers explains. “For Joe’s dream to ultimately be just playing with this band in a club that obviously holds about 150 people, that’s a root-able goal that doesn’t feel selfish,” he says.

He continues: “In a greater sense, it felt like the perfect metaphor for the central theme of the film. It’s this idea that life is about improvising and having to take all the unexpected things that are thrown at you and turn them into something of value, turn them into some beautiful… there’s no genre of music that’s a more perfect metaphor for the themes of the film that we were trying to tell than jazz.”

Pixar's Soul Perfectly Wraps Jamie Foxx's Music Trilogy
Soul has Jamie Foxx voicing the main character and music is an important part of the story, just like in two other movies with similar themes.

Jamie Foxx might have an unofficial (and perhaps unintentional as well) trilogy connected by music, with Soul perfectly wrapping it. Pixar continues to dominate the world of animation thanks to its visual and narrative quality, its characters, the themes addressed in its movies, and more, and not even the coronavirus pandemic could stop it from releasing its latest movie: Soul. Although it was originally planned to hit theaters in the summer of 2020, the pandemic forced the studio to delay the release of Soul and ended up sending it to Disney+.

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Soul follows Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle school music teacher who just as he books his biggest gig as a jazz musician, falls down a manhole. Joe’s soul ends up in the “Great Beyond”, and after resisting to go towards the light, he finds himself in the “Great Before”, where young souls prepare to go to Earth. Among those souls is 22 (Tina Fey), who spent a lot of time in the Great Before as she didn’t want to go to Earth. Soul’s existential themes and more are accompanied by jazz music, making it an entertaining story that will leave most viewers thinking about life, one’s true purpose and the concept of the afterlife.

Though Soul holds no connection to other movies, not even within the Pixar universe, it serves as a perfect conclusion to an unofficial trilogy of movies starring Jamie Foxx. It all begins with the 2004 movie Ray, where Foxx played legendary blues musician Ray Charles. The movie focused on Ray Charles’ career, following him through some of his darkest moments and learning about his early life through various flashbacks, with the story culminating in 1979 when Charles got off drugs for good and the song “Georgia On My Mind” was made into the official state song.

Next is the 2009 drama movie The Soloist, directed by Joe Wright and based on the true story of Nathaniel Ayers, a musician who became homeless and was battling with schizophrenia. Foxx plays Ayers, who is found by journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr) and decides to write an article about him while also helping him get out of the streets and go back to playing music. Ayers had a difficult family history, which along with his mental health issues drove him to the streets and made him volatile, but in the end, he changed Lopez’s life just as much as Lopez changed his. The final piece in Jamie Foxx’s unofficial musical trilogy is Soul, which sees yet another musician with his own inner struggles, but with no drugs nor mental health issues involved, though Joe also had a lot of work to do when it came to his career, his family, and how he was losing focus on what’s truly important.

Of course, Ray, The Soloist, and Soul aren’t connected and don’t live within the same universe, but they share enough themes and the same lead actor, serving as an interesting link between them. Whether Foxx intentionally chose the roles of Nathaniel Ayers and Joe Gardner due to their similarities to Ray and between them or not is unknown, but they make a fun trilogy offering different looks at the lives of troubled musicians.