Assessing the Meaning of Life in Pixar’s “Soul”
Can the movie’s life lesson be secularized?
The Pixar movie “Soul” provides a popular life lesson that’s summed up in its last line, “I’m going to live every minute of it [my life].” The recommendation is that you shouldn’t waste your life by becoming a lost soul, someone who’s obsessed with something that disconnects you from life.
This life lesson is presented in a panoramic narrative of a soul’s supernatural journey. From its pre-incarnation state in which the soul is innocent, the soul acquires a character as it’s guided by angelic teachers, and the soul finds its spark or yearning to live an embodied life.
The soul then takes a leap of faith and plummets to Earth where it lives out its life in the material realm. When the body dies, the soul travels to the beyond where it seems to lose its identity and merges with God or with the unity of all beings. Alternatively, the soul can choose to delay that reckoning and mentor pre-incarnated souls.
“Soul” focuses on a music teacher named Joe who is obsessed with playing jazz. Due to a series of rejections, Joe finds himself wasting much of his time preoccupied with a dream that won’t likely be realized. More importantly, he ignores much of what life has to offer, including the little wonders that are part of…