PERSONAL

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1,268

Soul

4 years ago627 words

I finally got around to watching this film, and it's easily one of the best things I've ever seen! I don't want to write a full review or anything; I just wanted to post about it briefly because it felt wrong not to acknowledge it at all.

It's a Pixar film, so it being amazing is nothing surprising. I recently signed up for Disney+, since there's quite a lot of stuff on there I'm interested in, so I watched it on there.



As a story about death, the afterlife, music, and finding meaning, it was very much up my street! Really interesting seeing fantastical depictions of spiritual concepts like a place where souls reside beyond - and before - life, sentient beings which are different from souls, and astral projection - being done by eccentric hippies - in a big film like this (actually I suppose Coco already played with similar themes, didn't it? And Inside Out is all about the inner world too...).

Also weird hearing Richard Ayoade voicing one of the characters; he's an eccentric British comedian I've liked for years who's been popping up in a bunch of big American stuff lately (he was in The Mandalorian too), which is always a pleasant - though somewhat baffling - surprise. Graham Norton was a name I knew too and was similarly surprised to hear in something like this!



I liked this concept of souls acquiring a distinct set of personality traits before they're born! THE THING EVEN LOOKS LIKE THE ASTER CLEARLY THEY STOLE IT FROM ME because nobody else could ever dream up such a unique shape. Nice seeing a depiction of personality traits as innate like this though, since psychologically they are!



The film touched wonderfully on the concept of mindfulness which has become quite popular in recent years, and which has been a big part of my own quest to tame my demons. It's all about just focusing on the details and sensations of exactly what's happening right now - forgetting about the past and future - and the way it was depicted in this moved me to tears as it brought back a flood of moving experiences I had while practising that. Really cut through the black cloud and made me want to get back into it!



I'm also extremely impressed by the visuals! Nothing new there since it's Pixar, but I really appreciate how they're always trying to do different things with their human models rather than just falling back on one Style as a lot of other studios seem to. The caricatured faces of African Americans in particular felt novel and impressively executed. Really inspired me to get back into trying to stylise faces again myself. Plus these non-soul beings were depicted in a super-stylised way that was distinctly Pixar (I think one of their shorts used similar-looking abstract characters?) and intriguingly otherly.

I don't need to say any more than that, really! I've been feeling terrible today - the damn head pressure feeling's back, very likely due to external stresses, though I suppose I'll find out after my next scan on Wednesday - and I watched this to try and distract myself. I record my moods, as I've written about before, on a scale from -3 to +3 (I'm usually in the -2 to +1 range), and watching this brought me up from a -2 to a +2, which never happens. The power of art!

I'd love to be able to make similarly moving art myself one day, and hopefully some of the magic of this will merge with all the other inspirations to help bring such a thing into being one day!

I'll write a dev update tomorrow!