Out of Body: SOUL

Pixar’s Soul is an unusually perceptive family movie about finding meaning in life. It dares to say life’s purpose is not to cultivate a great talent or have the perfect family or find true love. A good life is simpler than that. How rare it is to find any Hollywood movie resisting the  determinism of easy goals and cheap sentiment? This is a movie boldly pushing off into existential waters, directly confronting matters of life and death, and finding a satisfyingly artful and, well, soulful approach to those mysteries. What a neat trick. It starts with a New York City middle-school music teacher (Jamie Foxx) who dreams of being a jazz pianist. Although it’s clear he has the ability to communicate to his students some of the wonder he feels when getting lost in great music, vibing with talent when he’s in the zone, he has bigger dreams. Years of nights and weekends gigging in small clubs, or getting rejected by the bookers and bands thereof, is finally about to pay off when a jazz legend (Angela Bassett) invites him to join her quartet. Too bad, then, that on his way home from their meeting, he dies. Unlike Coco, the cavalcade of color and music and family togetherness that was Pixar’s prior sojourn into the afterlife, this film sends its lead to a cold and sterile place, an enormous glowing white light in total blackness, and a moving sidewalk going up, up, up. Where on Earth the score was full and jazzy with arrangements by Jon Batiste, here it's Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross with swirling New Age synths and spare melodies. Body-less, souls are glowing pale blue blobs led around by geometric modern art profiles. It’s a clear contrast to the bustling, realistically rendered world he’s reluctantly leaving behind. Our lead most desperately wants to escape. You can’t blame him. He falls off the path—through a dazzling variety of squiggly visuals—and lands where souls are trained to be sent down into babies. They must find their spark, a ticket out of this theoretical space and into the world below. This, he thinks, is his ride back to his body.

The stage is set for a typical Pixar plot: hurrying and scurrying around and through barriers and setbacks on the way to a clear goal, while playing loop-de-loops around the logic of a fantasy world. Our lead even gets paired up with a mismatched reluctant buddy, in the adorably aggravating figure of a soul that doesn’t want to be born (Tina Fey). (She’s the source of most of the comedy here, a kind of gentle rat-a-tat patter of silly quips and sparing cutaway gags.) Even so, the most pleasant surprise is to find that the film’s progression isn’t mere formula. Or at least, not completely. Writer-director Pete Docter (Inside Out, Monsters, Inc.) and his co-writer-director, playwright Kemp Powers, instead find through the conceit a means by which to explore the small things that make life worth living. The film tumbles back to earth with a supernatural premise of trying to rekindle a spark in a lost soul. There, resisting a grand thesis, or deadening satire (the afterlife’s bureaucracy has none of the rigorous rules of prior Pixar realms), the movie situates itself lovingly in small interpersonal moments. A teacher guiding a promising pupil. A barbershop bustling with friendship and connection. A mother who just wants the best for her son. A musician who hopes to live up to his potential to connect with a crowd. Because the animation is so warmly textured and fluidly developed, and the writing has such a keen ear for the music of the moments, there’s a remarkable sense of life bustling and bursting. It’s smooth, but takes the usual bops and bumps of this kind of parable; it draws favorable comparison to It’s a Wonderful Life for its otherworldly assist. And yet it doesn’t end with everyone improved supernaturally. It finds quiet contentment in warm memories and simple steps toward a brighter future. Here’s a family film with flights of fancy and eye-popping visual invention that finds its greatest astonishments in the ordinary details of real life.

The Life of the Mind: INSIDE OUT

Inside Out is a film so in touch with its protagonist’s emotions it makes them characters unto themselves. The result is one of Pixar’s loveliest conceptual gambits, daring in its simplicity, moving in its surprising dexterity. Certainly the idea of personifying the human brain’s many emotions is not a new one. But what’s new is this film’s sustained commitment to psychological zaniness, finding inventive and satisfying analogues for mental processes without losing a sense of compassion or an elastic sense of humor. A moving evocation of complicated emotions through brilliantly colorful cartoon adventure, it’s a perfect fit for Pixar’s favorite subjects: elaborate contraptions, colorful characters, memorable complications, affectionate teamwork parables, and emotional complexity. This is one of the animation studio’s warmest, most vital films in years.

Here is a film knowledgeable about what it’s like to be eleven, going on twelve, full of conflicting impulses on the bridge between childhood wonder and adult resignation. Our main character is Riley (Kaitlyn Dias), a girl whose loving parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) have decided to move from Minnesota to San Francisco, a prospect as intimidating as it is exciting. Our setting is her brain, amongst the little voices inside her head. Writer-director Pete Docter (responsible for modern classics Monsters, Inc. and Up) imagines a quintet of primary-color cartoon beings sitting behind a control panel in a big pastel room, processing incoming sensory detail and converting them into memories. Most importantly, they’re her emotions, helping her react to the world. Taking charge is Joy (Amy Poehler), but Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Anger (Lewis Black) are jostling to make themselves known as well.

The emotions are brought to vivid life in voice performances brimming with a child’s excitable naïveté. Joy isn’t the lead for no good reason. There’s energy and happiness, and character coherence as the five beings make themselves known through one voice. It’s easy to believe these different outlooks on life expressed by their color-coded geometric designs – sunny yellow flower Joy, blobby blue Sadness, wiry purple Fear, broccoli-green Disgust, squat fire-red Anger – add up to one character. They’re treated as figures of fun, predictable in their responses to any given development, and seriously as key components of any healthy mind. You might think a movie built around characters defined by precisely one emotion would grow monotonous, but the performers find remarkable shadings within their set ranges, piling on adjectives, growing complex as they work together to run one mind. Docter and crew find value in every emotion, acknowledging they each have their place.

As they punch buttons and manipulate glowing memory orbs on their way to storage, we see only a blending of their attributes can accomplish the goal. Trouble starts when, struggling to keep Riley joyful after the jarring cross-country move, Joy and Sadness are caught in an accident. They’re left stranded far from the controls, lost in Long Term Memory. The others try their best to keep Riley safe and sane, resulting in mood swings – sarcasm, panic, and outbursts. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness move through cartoon symbolism – a train of thought, warehouse workers causing forgetfulness, dream production studios, and a dark scary subconscious. This vision of the mind is a world of vibrant colors, candy textures in gleaming mental faculties factories and vast corridors of memories. Joy and Sadness work their way through lands of imagination, abstract thought, core personality traits, and crates of facts and opinions, on the way back to where they belong.

Imagination fills the frame. We meet a forgotten imaginary friend (Richard Kind), glimpse childhood memories, and meet some of Riley’s fears and dreams (scary clowns and towheaded boy bands). Rubbery cartoon mechanics in the mind – splats and bonks, stretchy expressionism and sight gags – tie to a real-world portrayed more drably and realistically, as the wacky emotions’ antics play out subtly across the girl’s face. It’s one of the most simply astonishing feats of animated acting I’ve ever seen. Inside her emotions contort and careen, while on the outside she appears thrillingly natural, a real little girl. It’s a terrific crosscut cause-and-effect, good for gags and heartfelt tenderness. This is as good a metaphor for depression as I’ve ever seen – inner conflict leading to outer discomfort and vice versa – wrapped in a buoyantly entertaining cartoon adventure. Riley is unhappy with her new circumstances and is unsure how to react. Starting over in a new place is difficult.

So is growing older. Memories fade. What once was important to your personality evolves, or disappears. Old happy memories gain bittersweet tints. This all packs quite the wallop. Like Up and Toy Story 3, it gains great power from its recognition of aging’s melancholy inevitability, and the importance of embracing new aspects of life’s journey, stepping forward with those you love. Here there are passages of childhood memory I would compare to The Tree of Life for their precise observation and overwhelming compassion. Moments inside the brain, cartoony though they may be, come freighted with symbolic imagery in vast stretches of psychology transmuted into only-in-animation splendor. There is no villain. Joy’s main goal to keep Riley happy all the time is recognized as unsustainable. In its simplicity, it’s complicated.

And yet it’s also light and lovely, teasing in its complexity. It contains great truths and great feelings without dragging itself down. Great fun is kept aloft by the lovable voices, Pixar-formula cotton-candy plotting (co-written by Meg LeFauvre and Josh Cooley), Michael Giacchino’s chirpy New Age fairy tale score, and a team of animators imbuing each frame with buoyant personality. It could make you laugh and cry and feel happy for doing so, indulging every single emotion at the controls of your responses as we speak. Another great Pixar confection, Inside Out is sweet entertainment for the whole family. And like the best family films, it imagines a lively multicolored scenario a little exciting, a little scary, as bright and funny as it is wise. In a world that can be full of forced good feelings and manic positivity, how wonderful to find such a fast, clever, entertaining argument for embracing every feeling in your emotional palate.

Up (2009)

Much has been made about the lack of merchandising appeal in Pixar’s recent movies. I fail to see why that should be so. From where I’m sitting, I can spot on my desk a WALL-E figurine and a stuffed Anton Ego (the food critic from Ratatouille). These aren’t conventionally appealing characters – they aren’t cute with pretty colors and soft edges – but they work on a better, deeper level. They’re characters to care about, to identify with, and they come from really good movies. With Up the kind folks at Pixar Animation have continued their uninterrupted run of greatness by once again giving us a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking work of visual splendor (I can’t wait to see the toys). I don’t like it quite as much as WALL-E (my favorite movie from last year), but that’s a tough act to follow for anyone, and doesn’t make Up any less of a masterpiece. There are moments so evocative, so moving, that I found myself with tears in my eyes; there are also moments so fresh with visual inventiveness and whimsy that I nearly whooped in joy. This is an exhilarating, uplifting film.

I purposely tried to stay away from plot details before my viewing, so I won’t discuss any here. After all, everyone now knows the basic premise: an elderly man lifts his house with hundreds of balloons and takes off for South America, along with a little scout stowing away. The surprise comes from how the plot kicks in and the direction it goes from there, a direction that is both more and less predictable than you might suspect. The film unspools in surprising and delightful ways. Pixar is still working at a different level than their computer-animation competition. Watch the ways colors bounce and shift through the mass of balloons, sending dapples of primary colors across the sides of buildings. Note the realistic gut-flipping depth to the heights. See how director Pete Docter and his team have created characters that are immensely appealing and have real emotional heft.

Ed Asner plays the old man, who is harboring a long dormant spirit of adventure, and mourning a deeply affecting loss. Asner brings the right amount of hidden charm to the man who’s not merely a grumpy-old-man caricature; he’s an understandable man with doubts, fears, regrets and vast reservoirs genuine human emotion. This character has more weight than many live action characters. His sighs pierce the soul as he shuffles about, the weight of his loneliness causing him to drag his feet as he clutches his cane, drooping ever closer to the ground. But watch how his adventure puts a new spring in his step as Asner gives his voice a bit more of a bounce and the animators slowly straighten his posture.

And what an adventure this is. There are thrilling chase scenes that soar through the frame with graet energy and color mixed with a confident sense of weight and place. Pete Docter also directed Monsters Inc, with its great climactic roller-coaster sequence that takes the characters through a vast warehouse of closet doors that zoom by at incredible speeds while the characters go through disorienting loops and drops. Here, every chase is like that virtuoso sequence. The characters are literally tethered to this floating house (some subtle in-your-face symbolism) during these chases, and there is great inventiveness in the way they flip, dip, fly, and fall but (hopefully) catch themselves at the last second. The action is perfectly paced and elegant in its cartoony construction. There are great moments of generous whimsy as the movie plays out like a vast expanse of the imagination, but the whimsy is focused and controlled, playing perfectly within the rules the movie sets forth. This is a movie giddy with the act of creation. The filmmakers know they have a great story to tell and trust the audience will go along with them on the incredible ride they’ve designed. It’s not as tight a plot as Pixar has had in the past. In fact, the movie feels unpredictably adrift in the specifics, but always, oddly, comfortably predictable in the arc of the ride.

This is certainly no mindless ride. Unlike Monsters vs. Aliens, which used its high-concept plot to merely plug in a couple sequences of high-speed – but bland – visual frenzy, Up unfolds with patience and care, hitting character moments both big and small with ease and subtlety that allows the action pieces additional stakes. We care about these people; we care about their dreams and goals, their hopes and fears. Above all, we want them to succeed. I could indentify equally with the old man and the little boy. They reminded me of people I knew, people I know; they are who I was, am, and could be. The opening scenes of the film introduce us to the old man as a little boy (looking a bit like a young Roger Ebert) then reveal his entire life to date (until he looks vaguely like Spencer Tracy), and are heartbreaking and beautiful, simultaneously, in their immediacy and potency. In fact, Pixar expertly shows in minutes the impermanence, the fleetingness, of life that some films can barely show in hours. It’s not often that family films tackle these feelings, along with feelings of regret, loneliness, and the awful and sweet unpredictability of life. Even rarer, the family film that tackles them well.

Up is beautifully rendered in picture and perfectly controlled in tone. There are shots that rival Miyazaki for pure artful beauty, but this is also, like Miyazaki’s films, a blast, as signaled by (the always great) Michael Giacchino’s excellent score that bleats with childlike glee at the humor with a deep, soaring, undercurrent of respect. It’s a fun and exciting movie. There have been other movies so far this summer that have made my inner child happy, but only Up pleases the inner child and the outer adult in equal, even overlapping, ways. (Only Star Trek's come close). This is a nimble, mature, complex film of deep emotion and huge creativity. In other words, Pixar’s done it again, with a film that lands on the heart with a feeling of permanence.

Note: Pixar’s tradition of including a pre-feature short is intact with the inclusion of the delightful Partly Cloudy, a work of quick visual humor that expertly manipulates emotions. Also, the use of 3D in Up is fairly unnecessary. Feel free to save yourself a few bucks by seeing it in 2D.