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The gag? Twenty-two’s soul lands in Joe’s body Joe lands in the body of the therapy cat snoozing in his hospital bed. The chief mystic-a hippie sign-spinning in the Village-helps Joe and Twenty-two get back to Earth in time for Joe’s life-changing jazz gig. Their souls traverse this spirit realm in a ship with tie-dye sails. A group of Mystics Without Borders, their earthly bodies respectively in Berkeley, Tibet, Palawan, and New York, tune in for an hour-long weekly session here, via meditation and trance. Intrigued by Joe’s plight, Twenty-two takes him to yet another limbo, the place where the souls of musicians and artists float when they are “in the zone,” and where Lost Souls, encased in a black soot of depression and obsession, march in miserable circles. There, he meets Twenty-two, an unborn soul who has yet to find her spark despite thousands of years of counselling by mentors including Mother Teresa and Muhammad Ali. He turns and runs, weaving through crowds of complacent souls, then slips past a membrane, plummets through a surreal laser show of dimensions, and lands in the Great Before.
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He finds himself a glowing blob with vaguely black features on the monorail to the blinding afterlife-and balks. At the film’s opening, Joe scores the gig of his life, only to fall to his death in the gaping mouth of an open manhole. Our hero, ostensibly, is Joe Gardner (voiced, initially, by Jamie Foxx), a jazz pianist who makes ends meet by teaching music at a public school.
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This is where the other meaning of the film’s title comes in: soul as in black, soul as in soul sister, soul brother, soul music-terms that originated in the jazz slang of the forties. Meanwhile, the chaotic messiness of Earth is represented, naturally, by New York City. The Great Before is also known as the You Seminar. Some souls find their sparks in the Hall of Everything, which resembles a giant indoor amusement park. A soul counter named Terry numbers souls on an abacus and riffles through filing cabinets. The Jerries carry clipboards they hold redundant meetings and award ceremonies in a mini-auditorium. This twenty-first-century vision of the incorporeal is, it seems, a corporation. The souls are shuttled through this process by soul counsellors-all of them named Jerry-who are depicted as ever-changing modernist doodles, two-dimensional and translucent, the Platonic forms of Platonic forms. These ready souls hover around the edge of a pit, then leap and plummet through the universe like skydivers until they reach whatever body awaits them on Earth. Each new soul is assigned a “mentor,” a member of the dead, to help the soul find its “spark,” which, once discovered, fills the final slot on the badge, and confirms that the soul is ready for life on Earth. In the Great Before, unborn souls, each given a number, bounce about through psychedelic fields of grass and soft buildings, collecting traits like “aloof” and “excitable” in the form of stickers on a badge pinned to the soul’s breast. Dead souls, on their way to the Great Beyond, stand on a transparent moving sidewalk that carries them steadily up toward a dazzling pointillist sun, which seems to be made up of them. In this upper realm, human souls are phosphorescent little blobs-half Casper, half sperm. It takes place in two worlds: the one we know, and an airy realm above that includes both the Great Beyond and the Great Before.
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Pixar’s new film, “Soul,” is shaped by these currents. It is likely related to psykhein, meaning “to breathe” or “to blow,” which may come from the Indo-European root - bhes, meaning “breath.” All of this is still with us in the idea of the divine breath that animates the flesh in the related word “spirit” and in the notion of inspiration-breathing life, excitement, joy into a person or a work of art. In ancient Greece, the word for the soul was psyche.