Trailer
Plot summary
By day Joe Gardner runs music classes at a middle school; what he wants is to play jazz. His mother, Libba, a seamstress, wants him to accept a full-time teaching post instead. A former student, Curly, tells him that Dorothea Williams needs a pianist in her quartet, and Joe's audition at a jazz club earns him the job for that night's show. Rushing off to prepare, he falls down an open manhole and turns up as a soul on its way to the Great Beyond. He escapes to the Great Before, where counselors called Jerry prepare unborn souls, and is mistaken for a mentor. Assigned to 22, a soul who has spent thousands of years avoiding Earth, Joe offers to help her find the spark that will complete her badge if she lets him use it to get home.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Soul (2020)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Animators used footage of music performers, including Jon Batiste, as reference for the film's musical sequences, and by capturing MIDI data from those sessions they retraced the exact key being played on the piano with each note.
SPOILER
The filmmakers were undecided on Soul's ending before the last screening: test versions ended with Joe pondering whether to pass on to the Great Beyond, returning to Earth a year later, or staying in the Great Before as a mentor, and storyboards of 22's life on Earth after her birth were discarded.- The astral-plane sequence took months to animate despite lasting only seconds on screen; effects supervisor Bill Watral compared the workload to the shower scene in Psycho, since animators had to painstakingly render sand, liquid and rock for the brief shot.
- Production on Soul lasted four years on an approximate $150-200 million budget, and it is the first Pixar film to feature a black lead.
- Kemp Powers made such extensive contributions to Soul that he became a co-director of it, which made him Pixar's first African-American co-director.
