Afterlife reflections from Pixar’s Soul

Having just published a book about heaven, a friend recommended I watch Soul, the latest release from Pixar now streaming on Disney+.

Soul tells the story of Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle-school music teacher who between lessons still dreams of making it big as a jazz pianist.

On the day he finally secures a gig with a world-famous saxophonist, Joe is so happy he fails to see a missing manhole cover on his walk home and suffers a fatal fall. ‘There must be some mistake,’ wails Joe as his soul rises on an escalator towards The Great Beyond, an amorphous dazzling light which absorbs ascending souls with an electric buzz.

Joe attempts to return to his body, but instead finds himself in The Great Before, a cloudscape land where souls must find the purpose that will spark their life before they can be born in a body on earth. There Joe is mistakenly given the job of helping Soul Number 22 (Tina Frey) find her spark, something which previous mentors (Mother Theresa, Copernicus, Mohammed Ali and Carl Jung) have failed to do because she ‘already knows everything about earth and it’s not worth the trouble’.

Like Up (2009) and Inside-Out (2015), all written by Pete Docter, Soul is perhaps more a film for teenagers and adults that has some interest for children, rather than the other way around (younger children might find some scenes distressing, such as the misery of souls lost in limbo).

The detail in the animation is superb even by Pixar’s high standards (such as when a cat momentarily chases a light reflection on a wall made by Joe’s glasses as he polishes them on his shirt), and the voice actors do a wonderful job of inhabiting the characters. The film has both pathos, fun, good music (if you like jazz, which I do), and a hilarious set of sequences that made me laugh out loud when 22 escapes to earth but gets stuck in Joe’s body while Joe’s soul enters the body of a pet cat. Joe watches in disbelief as 22 is awestruck by the simple act of walking, tasting her first pizza or watching a sycamore-leaf helicopter spin down from a branch through the setting sun. All Joe is concerned about is getting back into his own body in time to perform at the jazz club so he can make his big break.

Yet it is 22’s simple delight in the ordinary things of life that helps Joe begin to see that being so purpose-driven has led him to miss out on what makes life truly worth living – the simple joys of being an embodied being in a material world in which even the ordinary things of the everyday can be filled with wonder and beauty if only we have eyes to see. Which is a strangely ‘this world’ affirming message with which to end the movie when its main premise is that life on earth is merely a stage we pass through between the disembodied experiences of The Great Before and The Great Beyond.

The even stranger thing is that many Christians share this view of the afterlife despite it belonging more to an Eastern religious perspective than a Christian one. The Bible begins with the created goodness of the material world and the goodness of humans as embodied beings made in the image of God (Gen. 1:31). And it finishes with that good creation restored and redeemed in a new creation in which we will continue to be embodied beings (Rev. 21:1, Rom. 8:23). The good news of the gospel is not that we get to become a soul ascending into The Great Beyond, but that Jesus Christ will bring everything in heaven and earth together in one joyful and glorious reality (Eph. 1:10). The joy of embodiment that Joe finds in Soul fits far better within a Christian worldview than it does within the film’s own narrative of the eventual division of soul from body. Thankfully then, Soul’s positive message is something we can embrace as Christians knowing that our bodies, sycamore-leaf helicopters and sunlight are not only to be enjoyed for this life, but also for eternity.