Metacritic reviews

This densely packed, exquisitely executed and just a teensy bit batshit film is peak Pixar. It's a vintage mix of the company's intricate storytelling, complex emotional intelligence, technical prowess and cerebral whimsy on dexamethasone.

Visually glorious, frequently very funny and genuinely profound, this is a picture which cries out to be seen on the big screen.

Moving ever-onward from the sequels years, Pixar gets right back in the zone with Soul. Deep, witty, and fast on its jazz-loving feet, it doesn’t miss a beat.

It’s a deeply sweet, happy, gentle film.

It’s a ravishing ode, too, to gestures, touches, smiles, and pithy, pointless conversations; in Soul the tiny human interactions that we so often brush over come under the magnifying glass.

Like some of the best jazz compositions, it uses a traditional framework to veer off in many unexpected directions, so that even the inevitable end point feels just right.

Soul likes jazz very much. That’s a rare certainty in this ambitious film, which attempts to contemplate nothing less than the root of all human experience on this planet.

It’s comical, but not really a comedy, spiritual without being all that deep. But as it grapples with what drives a creative person, paints the “after life” and “before life” eternity in Picasso-with-a-light-pen strokes and questions what makes life worth living, it can be quite touching.

Soul is perhaps the most existentially ambitious film ever attempted by Disney and yet it pops with colorful visuals and gentle wisdom while the story clips along despite the dizzying height of the concept. Only in the final stages do the knots of plot complexity get the better of the characters, but audiences will have been well won over by then.

While not quite offering the emotional gut-punch it promises, its many ideas never completely cohering, Soul is nevertheless a gorgeous and tender existential trip. It’s full of surprises.