Soul, review: With beauty, humour, and heart, this is Pixar at its very best

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. But not only does Soul live up to Pixar’s own impossibly high standards, it represents the very best the studio has to offer: beauty, humour, heart, a gut-punch of an existential crisis. The film’s soul-searching comes courtesy of two very different individuals: the first is Joe Gardner, a man who’s placed jazz music at the very centre of his existence. The You Seminar is a soft bed of candy colours and clouds – one of the most purely serene and beautiful places Pixar has ever imagined, as inhabited by bobble-headed infant souls and their cosmic caretakers, who have seemingly been inspired by Picasso’s famous light paintings. Soul, in its celebration of all life has to offer, puts diversity, family, and community at its centre – it’s also, notably, the first of the animation studio’s films with a Black protagonist, even if a chunk of the film is spent with Joe’s soul, who’s rendered as a sort of humanoid blue blob.