‘Soul’ Review: Pixar Brings Family Fun & Existential Crisis for Christmas

Imagine you’ve spent your whole life working for a single goal, driving towards your passion with focus and dedication, until one day the opportunity of your lifetime arrives. Then you fall through an open manhole and die. What would you do to get your soul back to the land of the living? Image courtesy of Disney/Pixar An Existential Crisis for Christmas That’s the question asked by Disney & Pixar’s latest film Soul. Jazz pianist and middle school music teacher Joe Gardner (voiced effortlessly by Jamie Fox) finally gets invited to play alongside jazz star saxophonist Dorthea Williams (voiced by Angela Bassett). Then the open manhole thing happens. What follows is a colorful trip through the afterlife, the beforelife, and the heaven/hell that is New York City. Image courtesy of Disney/Pixar NYC So Real, It’s Wearing Timbs Pixar’s dedication to detail shines through in their depiction of New York City. This isn’t the LA soundstage that most sitcoms like to use, this is the living, breathing, stinking, sparkling city that you’ll recognize if you’ve ever lived there. It’s all so carefully captured: from a random busker singing so beautifully on the subway platform that you’d swear he’s finna drop a triple-platinum record to the nausea I still feel when a remember a moment when a character drinks something she found in a cup underneath the subway seats (I gagged when I wrote that…). It’s beauty truly blends and plays well into the film’s ultimate message (which I won’t spoil f…