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Soul
Movie

Soul

2020 • Animation, Adventure, Comedy

Woke Score
5
out of 10

Plot

Joe is a middle-school band teacher whose life hasn't quite gone the way he expected. His true passion is jazz and he's good. But when he travels to another realm to help someone find their passion, he soon discovers what it means to have soul.

Overall Series Review

The film centers on Joe Gardner, a middle-school band teacher obsessed with achieving his singular dream of becoming a professional jazz pianist. A sudden accident sends his soul to a metaphysical realm where he partners with 22, a cynical soul who has continually resisted being born onto Earth. The narrative, while beautifully animated, explores philosophical and existential questions about what makes life worth living. It explicitly rejects the idea that life must be defined by a grand, career-based 'purpose' and instead elevates the value of mundane, sensory experiences like eating pizza or catching a falling leaf. The plot features a body-swapping dynamic that has drawn significant criticism from an identity politics perspective. Its spiritual framework is entirely non-traditional, positing an afterlife and pre-life that functions as a bureaucratic training center, directly advocating for a secular, individualistic, and existentialist definition of meaning.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics8/10

The protagonist is an African-American man, marking a step for representation, with scenes authentically depicting Black culture like a barbershop. However, a central plot device involves the Black male protagonist's soul being temporarily displaced, leading to a different, un-gendered soul (voiced by a white woman) inhabiting his body for a significant portion of the film. This mechanic is widely interpreted as Black identity erasure, as the character's lived experience is hijacked and narrated by a proxy, reinforcing a critique of Black characters only being central when they are physically transformed or sacrificed for a non-Black narrative.

Oikophobia5/10

The film mildly critiques the dominant Western culture's obsession with individual ambition and career-based purpose, which Joe Gardner embodies. The message of finding fulfillment in 'just regular old living' and simple sensory pleasures contrasts with a success-driven, materialistic culture. The theme is existential and universal, but the contrast between Joe's American hustle and the film's final Eastern-influenced spiritual philosophy suggests a subtle rejection of the materialist side of Western civilization.

Feminism2/10

The main female character, 22, is an un-gendered soul whose core trait is an aversion to life itself, not a 'Girl Boss' identity. The jazz band leader, Dorothea Williams, is a highly competent female figure, but the film's focus is on Joe's personal crisis. There is no emasculation of male figures or anti-natal messaging, as the themes revolve around the meaning of individual life rather than gender dynamics or family structure.

LGBTQ+1/10

The core plot involves 'souls' that exist outside of race and gender, presented as abstract blue figures. Once on Earth, characters adhere to a normative structure. The film avoids centering alternative sexualities or gender ideology, dedicating its focus to a metaphysical quest for purpose.

Anti-Theism8/10

The film constructs an entirely bureaucratic, man-made spiritual cosmology (The Great Before, The Great Beyond, the Counselors Jerry). This framework explicitly replaces a transcendent, divine purpose with an immanent, subjective, and existential one, concluding that the meaning of life is found by the individual in the immediate, secular experiences of 'regular old living,' not in a higher moral law or Creator-given design. This philosophical foundation is antithetical to a worldview based on Objective Truth.