I haven’t had a chance to sit down and really ingest this yet, but I caught maybe the first hour uninterrupted and then bits and pieces thereafter. My take on what I’ve seen is that the movie simultaneously hews close to the Pixar formula and yet is unlike any movie I’ve ever seen.
I thought this was wonderful. I live in NYC, and seeing pre-COVID New York life depicted so lovingly was really moving.
Wait, again?
Sorry, I don’t get the reference. I’m pretty good about avoiding spoilers, is that what you’re saying?
Soul is about music, and the afterlife. Coco is also about music, and the afterlife. They are pretty different movies, though, to be fair.
edit:. Omg, they also both have four letters in the title!
Yeah, just the Coco thing, the last movie they made was also about music and dead people. Getting into a rut.
Coco and Soul are hugely different movies. Aside from them both being animated, they are nothing alike.
Aside from both being animated movies about music and the afterlife, you mean? I’ll be watching Soul soon enough, I’m sure.
You’re saying they’re same, and you haven’t even seen it?
They’re not the same. Soul has more in common with Inside Out than it does Coco. There’s not even a villain.
I mean it sounds like they have more in common than being animated movies to me. That’s what I’m saying. My initial “what, again” was for them going back to music well. Their movies have usually not hewn even that closely to each other, especially not one right after the other.
There are clearly some surface-level similarities (though I gather the actual themes are quite different). Regardless, though, there have been three films inbetween this and Coco: Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, and Onward.
Damn, time flies. Actually I had not even heard of Onward.
I think it only got an online release this summer? It didn’t make much of a splash, but it was nominally a major studio release.
Onward got a theatrical release and then went to Disney+. It got a fair amount of conversation here, and it gave Disney+ a nice bump. That and Frozen II went to + very quickly, right at the first height of the pandemic.
Got it, thanks for the clarification!
Yeah they didn’t have a lot of new on Disney+ until those two rolled in, and all of a sudden we’re watching theatrical movies on Disney+ months ahead of when they would expect it to release even on disc or pay 30 to own/stream stuff.
I can’t believe my girlfriend never mentioned this movie. Maybe she doesn’t know about it, either, and we’ll do a double feature of it with Soul.
Yeah, Onward came out right as the Pandemic was getting going - it was the last movie we saw in a theater (and the last time we ate indoors somewhere) - one week before everything in Chicago shut down.
So this was better than Wonder Woman 1984. Maybe not up to the exalted level of Coco, but definitely above, say, Onward.
One thing I liked is that it had a different look and sound than other Pixar movies, as well as the fact it didn’t just rush to the most obvious moral for the story.
Of course, changing things up in those areas is partially necessity: this is the fourth Pixar movie about an alternate plane of existence where metaphysical concepts are made flesh and the gag is that that these extraplanar abstractions act just like a real world company or town. (Monsters Inc., Inside Out, Coco and now this. Not counting Monsters U since it’s a sequel.) And since Frozen, “We made you think the message was well-worn trope X, but in fact the message is Y!” has started to become a well-worn Disney trope of its own. But overall, it felt like someone put time and effort into giving us a unique experience.
Some people might say that ambient electronica and Coltrane-esque hard bop go together like pickles and ice cream, but I really liked the soundtrack. (Music nerd note: while the ambient electronica parts were Reznor and Ross, the piano and jazz parts were Jon Batiste - a.k.a. Stephen Colbert’s bandleader, a.k.a. to New Orleans music fans, one of those Batistes.)
Yes, it was in theaters for maybe two weeks before the pandemic, so it didn’t have the full theatrical run.