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I Don’t Want to Write About Soul
I’m about to, of course, and write a lot in the process. So I suppose that I can’t not want to write about Soul that badly.
But there’s a part of me that just wants to let a good movie be a good movie without strapping it to an operating table and picking it apart for #hottakes. I’m acutely aware that I’ve done this in the past and will probably do it again in the near future — I’ve been sitting on a Joker essay for over a year now that I’ll be dropping soon. Still, there’s just something about how supremely enjoyable Soul is that makes me want to cocoon it away from the crossfire of internet criticism, most of which falls under the umbrella critique that the lead character Joe Gardner (a Black man voiced by Jamie Foxx) spends a majority of the movie in a form other than his own — and that it’s far from the first time that Disney has done this.
(That said, as a side note: having rewatched The Princess and the Frog recently, I’d argue that Tiana spending most of the film as a frog actually makes her romance with Prince Naveen one of the strongest in the Disney Animated Canon. In most of the princess films, especially the older ones, it seems like physical attraction does a lot of the heavy lifting to sell the inevitable marriage, despite the two leads having known each other for three days, tops. Naveen falling in love with Tiana while she’s a frog is an obvious…
