Saw Soul, another Pixar film by Pete Docter, creator of Up and Inside Out. Like those films, this one is a moving film about dealing with life. Also sort of like those films, this one is sort of a muddle. The main character is a Jazz musician who is laboring away in obscurity as a teacher. He dreams of greatness but, on the night of his big break, dies and goes to a sort of glitch-aesthetic afterlife where he runs into an unborn soul and tries to sort of convince it to want to live slash steal its ticket to earth.
The whole thing is a little muddle-y. I really thought the lesson at the end would be that happiness is where you find it and that being a teacher can be a perfectly satisfying life's goal. Similarly, that adopting a weary, seen-it-all attitude is a mask for cowardice. None of these points are made however.
It's a fairly rollicking adventure film really, almost a heist, with bodies and souls and Earth-passes serving as the heisted treasure. I feel like the real heart of the film comes near the end when the Jazzman has attained his goal and now feels let-down by his success. He's asks what now and is told, now we keep going. That moment is the most straight-faced and unambiguous, but also difficult in its simplicity - difficult to act on and obvious on first hearing. The rest of the film like that too: full of obvious revelations about life that are simple and complex at the same time. Perhaps they are profound?
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