SOUL (2020)

click here to return to "REVIEWS"

I really can't stand the FAMILY GUY cuts, the cheap cat based humor, the very stiff vocal performance from Tina Fey, the overly marketable forms half these characters take, the strange pacing, and the complete horseshit cop-out ending. So let's be clear--these are big parts of the movie, and they are well worth the stars deducted from calling SOUL a great movie. But i would call it a good movie. Underneath all its problems and no-doubt executive meddling, SOUL has... soul. I appreciate its message, that human beings do not require purposes to live, that a lack of concrete purpose and direction does not suddenly negate a life's value. This is a good message to give, even if it's clumsy and unanswered in the context of the main character's sidekick of who will certainly bore of the new and find herself in similar shoes to her mentor. But i also like that mentor relationship--I like the parallels between mentoring in general, and many of their scenes.

In the barbershop, on the stairs, beneath the streets and into the club... a viewer finds great scenes in a sea of otherwise mediocrity. Scenes from a better film.

Anyway, forget the performances and story and everything else. Something very interesting to me about SOUL is a question it asks completely unrelated to anything but the visuals: where to next for 3D? Indeed, much of 3D animation has been spent improving the technicals, making these movies pop and shine and look as detailed as possible. And that's definitely what's going on with half the environments of SOUL--they outright feel plucked straight from the reality of New York. Every concrete chip and slated brick, every shaft of light that pours onto its surfaces result in a technical marvel. but the film just as well asks where next. I mean, you've got to keep challenging the medium of 3D animation, right? That's what soul does with its rich and artistic environments disconnected from reality filled with characters who distort such. I'm talking about these messes of lines and shapes that speak dialogue--they're fascinating, and the way they move and the places they go speak to a yearning, a desire, to push 3d animation forward into new and exciting portrayals. And that's at war with the realism. Who wins in the end? Well, New York's pretty and all but... i'm always going to go for that which wears its own identity.

Anyway, you know that whole deal with TOY STORY III where you'd stitch in the credits right after a really heartwrenching moment in the plot, a part where the movie would not end normally otherwise? Well, someone should edit this movie in a similar fashion but not make it out as a joke at all--release it to torrent sites and don't say a fucking word about it. You can do better than Disney can, believe me.