This article contains spoilers for Soul.
Partway through Soul – Pixar’s latest film on Disney+ about a lost soul trying to return to his body – Unborn Soul #22 (Tina Fey) explains to the recently de-corporealized Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) that this isn’t real. “This whole place is a hypothetical,” they explain, a way for Joe’s “feeble human mind” to comprehend the existential process of transcendent creation.
Essentially, Joe is living through a metaphor. Soul presents pre-existence in “The Great Before” as a kind of pre-school, where Unborn Souls are provided “personality badges” that are completed by a “spark of inspiration” guided via mentorship. Soul also conceptualizes being “in the zone” – being immersed in the “flow state” of a particular activity – as a literal space that rests “between the physical and the spiritual.” In its imaginative premise, Pixar has adapted high-concept ideas as tangible spaces, allowing complex ethereal processes to be visually understood. This isn’t the first time.
Indeed, along with emotional scenes and high Dad Energy, Pixar often constructs imaginative frameworks to explain everyday phenomena. This is different from them anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, as they do in Toy Story or Cars. This collection specifically creates bureaucratic systems to explain away how the “real world” operates. Monsters Inc. was the directorial debut of Soul’s co-director Pete Docter, and it exists adjacent to our human realm. There, “monsters in the closet” is not an irrational childhood fear, but a professional system for “Monster” factory workers to extract an energy source.
Based upon the Mexican “Day of the Dead”, Coco literalizes the festival rituals. The afterlife is like an immigration system, photographs on ofrendas like a visa that permits the deceased to visit their relatives, and take their offerings back with them. Additionally, these dead are only sustained if remembered back on Earth, meaning they will fade away when forgotten.
Finally, and perhaps most explicitly, Inside Out (again directed by Docter) is set inside the consciousness of a preteen girl, overseen by primary emotions as her memories and personalities are maintained. Inside Out foregrounds the complex emotional journey of previously happy memories becoming tinged with sadness after an unexpected move to San Francisco, by having Sadness (Phyllis Smith) be a literal character who touches tangible memory spheres. All these Pixar films build extensive metaphorical worlds to concretely explore invisible concepts.
Pixar is hardly the only one to do this. Osmosis Jones, for instance, reframes the body of Frank (Bill Murray) as a “city” inhabited by anthropomorphic bacteria. As a white blood cell, Osmosis Jones (Chris Rock) is a “cop” who protects Frank from deadly viruses. More foundationally, Greek Mythology frequently provided origin stories for earth-bound phenomena, from spiders (a weaver condemned by the Gods to spin webs forever deformed) to echoes (a nymph condemned by the Gods to only repeat people’s last words). Such etiology provided simplified, pre-scientific explanations for how the world worked. This isn’t so different from the creative team at Pixar, who infuse these films with clear rules that present a charming correlation to the “real world.” They become extended metaphors to enlarge and analyze how things function. Although, rather than taking the form of folk tales, Pixar’s conceptualizations are more often bureaucratic.
Pixar’s worlds actually “demythologize” large abstract concepts like emotions or memory to make them more legible. By setting them as institutional systems with operators and guidelines, such concepts become a little safer and more manageable. Monsters Inc. may play upon childhood fears of “the Monster in the Closet,” but grounds them as blue-collar workers acting out of 9-to-5 jobs. Emotions are no longer messy psychoanalytic responses in Inside Out, but the result of personified figures that maintain physical Personality Islands. Soul is most similar to Inside Out, in that it reinterprets relatable experiences as systemic by-products. Inside Out visualizes how deep-seated memories (like advertising jingles) get brought up, or how ideas (like running away) can get stuck inside your head. Likewise, Soul provides a hilarious reason for the Knicks’ losing record, or getting “lost” in obsessive activities, not simply as actions in themselves by as part of a greater construct that Soul makes visible.
But these frameworks are not simply used for clever jokes and insights. Rather they form the emotional climaxes of Pixar’s films. In Soul, 22 becomes a “lost soul” from their self-perceived worthlessness. Therefore, Joe must not only comfort them but literally fight through the “cloud” of negative thoughts that surround 22. In Coco, Hector (Gael García Bernal) is only remembered by his daughter Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguía), and so begins to fade away towards the film’s end. Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) singing to Coco is therefore not only a sweet moment, but an act that literally resuscitates Hector. In Coco, remembering somebody is no longer an abstract gesture, but given immediate and tangible effects. On the surface, Inside Out is about Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) becoming emotionally deadened and running away from home. A sad story by itself, by through Inside Out’s framework this becomes a cataclysmic event, represented by her “headspace” literally crumbling as her personality develops.
Most stories feature some thematic subtext. Heroes do not merely fight their opponents, but whatever these opposing forces represent. Luke Skywalker destroying the Death Star is a military victory, but it’s also a symbolic defeat against an authoritarian Empire and the culmination of this forlorn farm boy taking his place in the wider universe. All fictional stories are metaphors that say something about the world, albeit indirectly. But with Pixar, these metaphors become the foreground. They make the undercurrents of dramatic scenes visible and have them play out alongside the regular story. This isn’t a critique of Pixar, who pull this off marvelously, but rather amazement at how even when Pixar tackles abstract concepts they infuse them with such care and detail that such personifications loop around to effective storytelling.
Pixar’s frameworks do not always make airtight logical sense, but they aren’t supposed to. As 22 tells Joe, they are all hypothetical. Metaphors help people imagine and understand how the world works. And more often than not, these metaphors fail. Monsters Inc. has Sully (John Goodman) reinvent the factory to gain energy from children’s laughter instead of screams. Inside Out has Joy (Amy Poehler) realize that Riley should not just be happy all the time and that memories can have a complex mix of emotions. And Soul shows that “personality badges” are not definitive, with people able to do multiple things in their life.
Pixar assembles these imaginary worlds so that audiences, children and adults alike, can better comprehend the world around them. But they also break these constructs to demonstrate the “real world” is inevitably more complex than them. They are only a metaphor, after all.
Soul is available for streaming on Disney+
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