This is about the Pixar movie Soul.
Joe is a middle school band teacher. He dreams of playing on stage with one of his idols and actually gets the chance to do so. But right before the gig, he dies.
What color is Joe’s skin?
If you said “I don’t know,” that would be the correct answer. The detail was purposefully omitted.
It would be understandable if you answered with “white.” There is always context, even if it’s not specified by the movie itself. For example, there’s the fact that you’re watching a movie, where you’re watching it, and who made the movie. The fact that we’re talking about a Pixar movie confers some context. Their movies with human characters don’t usually have people of color, or if it does, it’s one or two token characters. Frozone from The Incredibles is their first black character. Other than that, I can’t name off the top of my head a character person of color in any of their movies that predate Soul. So guessing “white” is reasonable, even without knowing anything about the movie.
If you answered “It doesn’t matter,” that would also be correct, but not because it’s the typical, limp-wristed pandering to the very real and pure idea that race in general should be irrelevant to most matters for the sake of equalization. Here, “it doesn’t matter” is a sincere and objectively correct answer.
To finally answer the question, Joe is black. For the purposes of the movie, it doesn’t matter.
For the discussion here, it is going to be a neutral element.
Especially since the other main character isn’t white. In fact, nobody is white. Pixar finally and earnestly went multiracial for the first time, and they went all. tf. In. We could list all the characters in every single scene, but let’s skip that since there’s only five white characters. Moonwind is one. Another gets a grand total of about one whole minute of screen time. For the rest of the human cast, they’re non-white. Instead of giving away who the other three white characters are, I’ll let you go find them. It’ll be a fun game of Spot the Honky.
The fact that that game is not easy to play using a Pixar movie is just so refreshing. Not just for Pixar, but for movies in general. There still is not adequate equitable representation of non-white folks in movies. The most damning evidence that it is still an issue today is the whole “The one Storm Trooper in Star Wars is black!” explosion on the Internet. This happened just in 2014. We’re not far enough from that moment yet, both temporally and culturally, to say we’ve made any noticeable progress. Since then, Soul is the biggest step in the right direction.
The reason race is irrelevant to the movie is because the movie pulls just a few tricks to assert, for all 90 minutes, in a movie made mostly by white people, that race isn’t the focus, or even tangential, to the plot and message. The fascinating part is how subtle these tricks are.
First trick: Music first
Right before the beginning of every Disney movie, they have that logo animation of the magic kingdom and the fireworks and then the sparkly arc and it says “Disney” at the bottom. If it’s also Pixar movie, they’ll then show the Pixar logo animation with the hopping lamp. Then the very first scene of the movie starts.
What they did here was the music that usually plays during the Disney logo is actually being played by characters in the movie, a grade school band practice. You don’t see these characters yet, you just see the usual logo thing while they play. The little music piece ends as the animation ends. Then, since it’s a Pixar movie too, as the Pixar logo appears, and you hear Joe say happily, “Alright! Let’s try something else.”
Then the first shot of the first scene is Joe’s face.
That first shot might think it highlights the fact that Joe is black, but it actually doesn’t. Before you learn of his race or gender or anything else his physical appearance may imply, you learn that he’s into music. You hear music, then a guy, and then it shows Joe. Naturally, the audience may understand that voice to be of the character the movie presents first, and indeed they are correct here.
But the music plays first.
So, to recap, during the Disney logo, a grade school band tries their best at playing the music (bless their hearts), and then during the Pixar logo, you hear a male voice say “Aright! Let’s try something else.” And then it shows Joe, leading the band in practice in a classroom.
The fact that the kids play the music poorly highlights the fact that it’s music, not just the usual boring stuff Disney corporate requires in every movie, but a unique and, uh, attention-grabbing, uh, rendition. Yeah. To put it politely.
Then you hear Joe talk.
Before it shows Joe, the first fact the movie asserts about him is the primary link the audience will rely on to further understand the character. Joe is about music, not being black. The movie says “We’re playing the music first because that’s what matters. Joe is a musician, not a black guy who likes jazz.”
He is a black guy that likes jazz though. Movie, we’re gonna cut you some slack here because of this first little feat.
Second Trick: No race (or even gender) in the afterlife
Joe dies, unfortunately, but it’s only part of the setup. The entire movie is about him trying to get back to his body. Early in his adventure in the afterlife, he meets another soul, 22, who is constantly compelled by others to go be born on Earth but constantly refuses. Yeah, her name is 22.
But 22 is not necessarily a ‘she’ or a ‘he.’ 22 is a soul. Since she’s voiced by the wonderful Tina Fey, we’re gonna refer to 22 as she/her for simplicity’s sake. 22 also has no race. Again, though, the movie does not specify either way, except with just one joke, but it’s a joke about the movie’s self-awareness. Anyway, it’s immaterial. Funny how that keeps happening here.
No gender, no race, no human body even. They meet in the afterlife, so the first time we see 22, she’s a floating marshmallow shaped like a button mushroom with a face and arms. Joe’s spirit is shaped similarly. The one joke the movie makes is Joe asking why 22 sounds “like a middle-aged white lady?” She doesn’t fire back with “why do you sound like a black dude with stereotypical interests?” even though that would be not entirely off the mark. She says, with a thin coating of smarm, that she can sound like anyone she wants, and she’s settled on her current voice “because it annoys people.”
So, even though Joe is a black guy, his spirit doesn’t represent either of those facts, and the movie lets you marinate in that fact for a full 12 minutes (that’s 13% of the movie, more than enough time to cement just one concept of a character) before he meets 22. When they meet, it’s marshmallow-meets-marshmallow, and it’s a fun introduction of 22, too.
The movie makes it all too easy to completely forget that Joe is black not just because it says at the very beginning “that’s not what this movie is about,” but also because it takes that feature of his away almost instantly as his soul looks like a fuzzy pastel Smurf because, again, that’s not what this movie is about.
Third trick: Cat
22 decides to help Joe get back to his body, but when he finally gets the chance to get back in it, 22 falls down with him and they land in the wrong bodies. 22 lands in Joe’s body, and Joe lands in the body of a… cat.
They had the opportunity here to throw him into the body of a white, middle-aged woman, but again, that’s not this kind of buddy flick. The movie avoided making any kind of metaphor or comparison of race or gender by throwing Joe into a completely different species. It could’ve been a white lady, an old Asian dude, or anything human, but it takes a hard-left and hurls Joe’s soul straight into a cat. We don’t know the cat’s gender.
The movie leaves unanswered the questions of what race or gender 22 is born into, or any other questions about race or gender as they relate to 22, which blocks any metaphors that otherwise could be inferred or manufactured from the relationship between Joe and 22. The only loophole is that one joke, but we’re gonna leave that alone because it’s a loophole and that’s not what this movie is about.
Ta-da.
What It’s About
Joe, a musician, teams up with an unborn soul and go on a reality-crossing voyage to ultimately understand what more life has to offer.
The movie isn’t about race, or gender, and avoids even hinting at issues of the day such as racial tension, disenfranchisement or opportunity-robbing prejudice. It’s titled Soul for a reason. It’s not about a lost soul, or Joe’s soul. We should see people only as who they are, and that’s everything this movie is about.