Soul (Pixar, 2020) is the story of Joe Gardner, a jazz musician who dies on the day his dream comes true and must navigate the afterlife — a realm called the 'Great Before' — to return to his life. It is Pixar's most philosophically ambitious film and one of the most direct engagements with questions of meaning, purpose, and what makes life worth living.
Soul's central question — "What is your purpose?" — is one Christianity takes seriously. More specifically, the film challenges the assumption that purpose comes from achieving a dream. Joe's discovery that fulfilling his lifelong dream doesn't actually satisfy the deeper hunger is a profound insight. Ecclesiastes 2:10-11 — "Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless" — is essentially what Joe discovers in the first act.
The film's resolution — that meaning is found in present-moment attention, in a free pizza slice eaten on the street, in the sound of a maple seed spinning down — is genuinely beautiful. It is not the full Christian answer, but it is a real corrective to the achievement-obsessed culture that sends people into crisis when they reach their goals.
Soul's afterlife framework is where Christians need to engage critically. The "Great Before" — where souls receive personalities before birth — is a form of soul pre-existence theology, present in some Eastern religious traditions but absent from orthodox Christianity. The film presents this framework as simply true, not as one perspective among many.
More significantly, Soul's answer to "what is the point of life?" is essentially humanistic: presence, experience, connection, and being fully alive in each moment. These are good things. But the film places the source of meaning entirely within human experience rather than in God who gives life its ultimate significance. Colossians 3:23's "whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord" — not for self-actualization — is the Christian frame Soul approaches but doesn't reach.
Soul's philosophical depth makes it more appropriate for older children (10+) and adults than for young children. The concepts — death, the afterlife, purpose, meaning — require life experience and cognitive development to engage properly. Young children will find it confusing; teenagers and adults will find it thought-provoking.
It is an excellent film for Christian families to watch together and discuss. The questions it raises — What is your spark? What makes life meaningful? What happens after death? — are precisely the questions Christianity has the deepest answers to. Used as a discussion starter, Soul is valuable. Accepted uncritically, its secular humanist framework is worth noting.
Rate any movie, show, song, or channel for spiritual alignment.
Visit GodlyScore.com →