Current Events > 'Soul' Is Pixar's Existential Threat

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://imgur.com/NrNsd2e

Designed to alienate black music culture from its gospel roots, Pixars Soul goes all out for secular existentialism. Its a devious kind of bedtime-story indoctrination in which a disillusioned public-school music teacher, Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx), searches to find a new meaning of life. Joes adventures take him through familiar comic circumstances (School of Rockstyle band instruction), family obligation (a domineering mother), and social opposition (competing for personal artistic recognition) that lull Pixar viewers into, once again, accepting the brands routine pattern of juvenile self-absorption.

When a street accident shifts Joes mortal consciousness to the other side, he repeats the pattern by which black social advancement has drifted away from the spiritual foundations of once-revered freedom and emancipation movements. He finds himself in the zone, which his guide #22 (voiced by Tina Fey) instructs him is the space between the physical and the spiritual.

Industry giant Pixar shows so little non-technological imagination that it has run out of find-your-way-back-home Yellow Brick Road plots and has recently, since 2015s Inside Out, settled on sedentary, sleepy-time narrative: mind games.

But Joe mistakes solipsism for thought. Hes told, This isnt the great beyond, its the great before, which allows Pixar and co-director/writers Pete Docter and Kemp Powers to veer from their subject into animated hijinks that often look like drug-induced hallucination. Souls visual style concentrates on abstract-art other worlds. A century after the groundbreaking Armory Show introduced the split-perspective of African-inspired European art, Pixar softens that advance into cute existential surrealism.

But thats not Souls only offense. Its marketing concept (starting with a raggedy New Orleans jazz-band rendition of When You Wish Upon a Star for the Disney logo) shamelessly exploits African-American culture from the misleading title to the misrepresentation of black artistic experience. Joes idolization of jazz performance (he longs to appear at the Half Note, a cartoon version of the New York jazz mecca the Village Vanguard) is essentially the modern worship of celebrity (represented as bossy female jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams, voiced by Angela Bassett). He seeks fame rather than an understanding of jazz history or those struggles that Charles Mingus described in Beneath the Underdog.

Not since the Beat movement has soul been so easily sold to all (meaning white hipsters). Docter and Kemp know what sells in studio boardrooms, and so a cartoon about a black musician/school teacher who loses touch with his cultural and spiritual heritage lines up with progressive Hollywood worldliness. (So does inserting Dylans Subterranean Homesick Blues alongside the image of mystics on a sailing ship with a peace-symbol anchor. Agnostic activists never give up.)

Joes self-examination (some people just cant let go of their own anxieties and obsessions, leaving them disconnected from life) repeats the same politicized, nonreligious pattern that currently turns artists into hyphenates (writer-activist, singer-activist, actor-activist), indicating that artists are no longer inspired, in the sense of Gods inspiration, but must be committed to social, political work instead. Joe searches for his spark because #22 warns him, You have no purpose.

The point of Soul is to normalize secular thinking and secular art. The old R & B concept of soul was derived from musicians who applied their gospel-church backgrounds to popular music as part of a unifying black American experience, their spiritual and natural lives driven toward freedom and salvation. But Pixar pilfers this heritage and warps it into phony, overcomplicated ideation.

Unlike the historical pessimism seen in August Wilsons Ma Raineys Black Bottom, Soul pretends to combine Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Kant a new KKK contrived to make parents feel smart and leave children feeling hopeless. 2020 is so exhausting, who needs this carnival of nothingness?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/soul-is-pixars-existential-threat/
---

Gafemage posted...

Soul pretends to combine Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Kant a new KKK contrived to make parents feel smart and leave children feeling hopeless.

this made me laugh

---

Good review

Lmao, is this satire?

---

Armond White is a really good writer even if he's peddling disingenuous nonsense a vast majority of the time.

---

Armond White is the greatest film critic of all time

---

We were all thinking it

16-BITTER posted...

Then he isn't a good writer

Nah, he's a good writer that just also happens to be a smug troll.

---

Gafemage posted...

Soul pretends to combine Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Kant a new KKK

ok, this is hyperbole to the offensive

---

Gafemage posted...

Joes self-examination (some people just cant let go of their own anxieties and obsessions, leaving them disconnected from life) repeats the same politicized, nonreligious pattern that currently turns artists into hyphenates (writer-activist, singer-activist, actor-activist), indicating that artists are no longer inspired, in the sense of Gods inspiration, but must be committed to social, political work instead. Joe searches for his spark because #22 warns him, You have no purpose.

Err wasn't it the opposite? #22 was searching for her spark not Joe.

---

It's like Armond White put all of his skill points into finding creative ways to criticize literally everything and just willingly decides not to criticize weird shit

---

The MO of the entire Dinsey Industrial Complex is to take pre-existing cultural ideas and stories, strip them of their substance, and replace it with generically palatable, non-challenging platitudes.

Soul isn't a unique victim in that regard. >_>

---

AlisLandale posted...

The MO of the entire Dinsey Industrial Complex is to take pre-existing cultural ideas and stories, strip them of their substance, and replace it with generically palatable, non-challenging platitudes.

They secularized Notre Dame, somehow.

lol

---

Bump
---

That's pretty racist but also hilarious.
---

lilORANG posted...

That's pretty racist but also hilarious.

Almond White is a black gay man lol
---

Gafemage posted...

The point of Soul is to normalize secular thinking and secular art.

...And what's wrong with that?

---

I should probably see Soul then decide if I agree.

---

Oh shit, haven't even heard about this guy for a while. Still a pompous ass.

---

16-BITTER posted...

It doesn't matter how pleasant his diction is if his ideas are stupid

His ideas being stupid has nothing to do with his abilities as a writer.

---

Solar_Crimson posted...

...And what's wrong with that?

Oh, now we like appropriation?

Amazing! That's exactly what my 11 year old niece told me when I asked her what she thought after watching it.

Well actually, she just said "I liked it!" But I read between the lines.

Gafemage posted...

Almond White

really autocorrect
---

Usually, my only real thoughts and feelings while watching this sort of film is "oh hell, another song?!"

lol

---

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armond_White

You guys need to read a bit about him before you take this too seriously.

---