Soul (2020)
- To accurately portray their role in Soul, Jamie Foxx spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Pete Docter.
- Soul utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Pete Docter.
Soul is a 2020 American animated film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Pete Docter. The film follows Joe Gardner, voiced by Jamie Foxx, a middle school music teacher and aspiring jazz pianist in New York City who finally gets his big break β an invitation to perform with a legendary jazz quartet β only to fall into a manhole and find himself as a disembodied soul heading toward the Great Beyond. Desperate to return to his body before his opportunity is lost, Joe ends up in the Great Before, a realm where new souls develop their personalities and interests before being born, and is paired with 22, voiced by Tina Fey, a cynical, world-weary soul who has refused to go to Earth for millennia because she can't find her "spark" β the thing that makes life worth living.
Soul was Pixar's most philosophically ambitious film, directly confronting questions about the meaning and purpose of life that most animated films β indeed, most films of any kind β would never attempt. The film's visual design distinguished between the Great Before and Great Beyond, rendered in abstract, ethereal shapes, and the New York City sequences, which were among the most photorealistic environments Pixar had ever created. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed the score for the metaphysical sequences while Jon Batiste provided the jazz compositions.
Soul earned $121 million worldwide during a limited theatrical release amid the COVID-19 pandemic and simultaneously debuted on Disney+. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Score.
