Movie Analysis - Blog Posts

Thoughts on Disney Pixar's Soul

Anyone like me who missed the movie soul cause it went straight to streaming during the pandemic, please take a moment to watch it because it's a master piece.

The art style is a beautiful mix of hyper realistic rendering and cartoon caricature and the intentionality of when it leans more into either style says a story of its own. The first things I noticed were the musical instruments rendered in way more detail than necessary, the pictures in his class of real people and not caricatures.

Then it was the perspective shots of 22 experiencing life, where the art was again, all hyper realism. The overwhelming nature of nyc to the beautiful moment of them feeling the spark of life. And in those moments despite the realism, it was not new york I saw. I blinked and I was transported to all the moments in my own life that paralleled that moment and I remembered the cold breeze on my skin, the smell of rain on cement, the context of my memories that made me feel that spark of life.

And when Joe laid out the trinkets they had gathered as proof of living that day and started playing the piano, as he went through his own memories, his proof of living his whole life, I sobbed. Once again, with every blink I saw my own life and every memory and emotion proof that I have lived. The score he played truly felt like it represented the feeling of being alive. Being alive through all the pain and joy and excitement and despair, a feeling so human.

What's insane about this is that I'm not from NYC, I don't take the subway to work, I have nothing to do with music or jazz. None of those moments or memories are directly relatable to my life. And yet I feel it represented my life.

The movie itself was a piece of art of course but watching it, the emotions it invoked in me felt like a separate multimodal artistic experience. One so deeply personal, I cannot express it to you in words.

Please go watch it for yourselves. If you watched it when you were younger and are now a full adult, please watch it again.

(I could go on about how perfect jazz is as a metaphor for life but I'm not the most qualified for that. If anyone is, please do talk about it)

I have watched “The Witch” (also known as “The VVitch”) this Thursday (Halloween) and here’s something I noticed this run through that I missed the first time I watched it

Spoilers ahead

Ok so Thomasin in order to prove that she is not the witch who has been tormenting and murdering her family and that it may be Jonas and Mercy (two of her younger siblings) she states that Lucifer is known for taking the form of a horned beast (such as a goat), the twins constantly say that Black Philip (who is a goat) (and is actually the Devil in the form of a goat) tell them things, Thomasin says that the Devil always whispers in his adversaries(?) ears WHISPERS (she reiterates the “whisper”which is why I capitalize it like that)

Then the mom, Katherine, has a dream(?) that her two other children, Sam and Caleb have come back to her, in this dream the older son Caleb whispers the whole time even asking her to look at a book for him, which it is stated that the Devil has a book that he gets people to sign

This means (and I could be wrong) that the Devil used Katherine’s grief over her dead sons in order to get her to sign his book

SONIC MOVIE 3 THEORY AND ANALYSIS TIME

So, in this picture we see with Shadow, pre Maria incident, his eyes are gold. It’s after she dies that his eyes turn red with rage. I like to think his eyes have stayed red since with this rage.

Now in this short scene where we see him say “what?” His eyes are starting to go back to gold. What I believe is that in that scene, someone, more than likely Sonic, will say something that reminds Shadow of something Maria said. I can imagine him having a flashback, him stopping in his tracks. “What?” He says, his tone softer than usual. He’s remembering Maria’s wish. What she really wanted. That’s why his eyes are changing back.

By the end of the movie, I can imagine his eyes staying like this, the inner part gold, a reminder of who he once was and showing a softness to him. But the red will always be there, that rage now a part of him.