Soul (2020): A review
It’s strange to associate death with childhood unless we are talking about the stranger world of cartoons. Ironic, right? Well, take any of your favourite cartoon characters and there would be a premature death written into their scripts very early on. Without bereavement, cartoon characters don’t hold water. Why? Because that’s the only way they can be real. Or to put it succinctly, that’s the only way they can be us. You and me, the abysmal vessels of loss and foreboding.
From Mowgli to Simba, from Snow White to Toy Story, from Bambi to Coco, all the main characters are conspicuously grieving. They’ve gone through a phase of separation already. To celebrate life, we’ll have to walk on the altar of death: that’s the ground rule whether you are born a human or not. And animation creators understood this facet well a century ago and they understand it well to this day. The fact that gifted people could think of a movie like Soul (2020) feels like a nod to our continuous fascination with the end.
Usually, a story dealing with the Big D casts a protagonist standing by as they lower the casket containing somebody else. Pixar upends this narrative by creating a yarn around a man who is attending his own demise. In its quest to dig deeper into the afterlife, Soul comes up with a wonderful setting of what could happen after a person perishes. A lot of the resulting scenarios gnaw on the religious absurdities without stepping on anybody’s toe—which is a mark of genius in today’s polarized society—and we find ourselves rooting for our affable underdog to make it big.
Not just in life. But after, as well.
A beautifully crafted film, with soulful (no pun intended) jazz music to reckon with, we are straddling between two realities: one where our hero is about to die and the other where our hero is about to live again. It’s an amazing fix. Only an animation of the highest order could capture this dichotomy so sharply.
There are several moments of truth throughout the film—peppered by tender dialogues that make your ears stand up—and you realize that the story isn’t about a simple man who couldn’t succeed when he had breath in his lungs. It’s not even about death, for that matter. It’s about something much deeper: the purpose of life.
We millennials love throwing words like passion and drive to make a point about meaningful living but Soul takes a detour and successfully makes a point about pointless existence.
All situations take place because they must take place. If they don’t take place now, they will take place in a different dimension with different characters. What has to happen must happen. Which means, if a person is supposed to drop dead at a particular point of time, he must drop dead. As poignant and defeatist as that may sound, human control is ridiculously limited. We may build wind turbines with each blade measuring over 100 meters but when the moment has to arrive, it will. The greater question being, how do we go about it?
As Buddha once suggested, the only way to deal with a situation is to accept it first. To the credit of the makers of this marvelous movie, they remind us how to go about the acceptance part. Small mercies there wasn’t anything cartoonish about it!