Soul

Dear Mark,

Pixar's latest animation picture Soul, like its predecessors Coco and Inside Out, is a metaphysically engaging experience. As we follow Jazz musician Joe Gardner through the landscape of limbo between life and death, we are gifted with the physicality of the Big Questions: Where do we go after death? What comes before life? Where do personalities come from?

A Nietzchen existential crisis is personified in Soul 22, as the apprentice lost soul who is satisfied to remain lost in the Before Life due to her perception of the pointlessness of life on earth. Joe Gardner is tasked with showing her what it means to be alive, and in doing so, surprises himself by the ordinary beauty of life on Earth, outside of his singularly destructive narrative of becoming a successful musician. The multisensory experiences of life: relationships, food, and the beauty of the natural world, are used to persuade Soul 22, and the audience, of the transient nature of time on Earth, and consequently, the importance of immersing ourselves in all it has to offer before joining the stairway beyond.

Another Pixar film that I wish I would have seen in childhood, but the message, nevertheless, is ageless.