Soul follows jazz musician Joe Gardner who accidentally ends up in a pre-death realm and must find his way back to life. Visually extraordinary, emotionally deep, genuinely philosophical. The spiritual framework (a Great Before, a Great Beyond) is inventive but non-biblical. The film's core message — be present to your life, don't let ambition consume you — resonates with Christian values. No negative content concerns. 62/100 Mixed.
Soul (Pixar, 2020) follows Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle school music teacher who gets his big break — and immediately falls down a manhole. He finds himself in the Great Beyond (afterlife) and escapes into the Great Before — a realm where souls develop personalities before birth. He partners with soul 22 (Tina Fey) to return to his body. Soul won Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score and is widely considered one of Pixar's finest films.
Soul's cosmology — Great Before, Great Beyond, pre-existing souls — is an invented framework with no specific religious source. It draws vaguely on ideas of pre-existence and generic afterlife imagery without promoting any existing religion. It is not promoting New Age, Mormon, or any other specific tradition; it is using spiritual imagination for storytelling.
The film's core message aligns with Christian values: don't let ambition and the pursuit of "your one thing" consume the actual texture of your life. The small joys — a slice of pizza, autumn leaves, music with a student — are worth attending to. This resonates with Philippians 4:8, Ecclesiastes's warning against striving, and Jesus's call to notice the birds of the air (Matthew 6:26-29).
Soul is appropriate for families with ages 8+ and warrants parental conversation about the spiritual framework. The afterlife imagery is inventive but not doctrinally threatening — the conversation is: "That's a creative story about what souls might be like; here's what the Bible actually teaches." No negative content concerns otherwise. See our Christian Faith Films hub. Compare with Encanto. Plugged In reviews it in detail. Available on Disney+.