Soul Review

Pixar's best late film is also its strangest sell: a movie about a middle school band teacher who dies before the story starts and spends the rest of the runtime arguing about whether purpose is a thing you find or a thing you were sold. The New York half is the most specific this studio has ever been, down to subway grime, barbershop chatter and the particular way Joe's hands sit on the keys, and the animation of Jon Batiste's playing is genuinely felt rather than approximated.

The Great Before is the opposite, all soft geometry and thin Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross tones, and the contrast does the thematic work without anybody having to give a speech. Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey are both cast against type and both better for it. The body swap detour costs the middle act momentum, and 22's arc resolves faster than it earns. But the last twenty minutes, and one falling maple seed, land a genuinely adult idea inside a family film: that a life spent waiting to matter is a life you have already had.