Pixar’s Soul trailer treads similar existential ground as Coco, Inside Out

Jamie Foxx voices middle school music teacher Joe Gardner in Pixar's Soul.

A high school music teacher on the verge of a big break finds himself taking an unexpected detour through the afterlife in Soul, the latest animated feature by Pixar. Based on the trailer, it looks like Soul will have a similar existential emphasis on depicting highly abstract conceptions of human consciousness and the afterlife as Pixar's Inside Out (2015) and Coco (2017).

Directed by Pete Docter (Inside Out, Up), Soul features the vocal talents of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Phylicia Rashad, Daveed Diggs, and Questlove. Per the official synopsis:

Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. But one small misstep takes him from the streets of New York City to The Great Before-a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities, quirks, and interests before they go to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22 (Tina Fey), who has never understood the appeal of the human experience. As Joe desperately tries to show 22 what's great about living, he may just discover the answers to some of life's most important questions.

Docter told Entertainment Weekly last November that the film is "an exploration of, where should your focus be? What are the things that, at the end of the day, are really going to be the important things that you look back on and go, 'I spent a worthy amount of my limited time on Earth worrying or focused on that'?"

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