A middle-school band teacher who yearns to pursue a career as a jazz musician all of a sudden finds his dream (and life) cut short. The first trailer for Disney and Pixar’s Soul is beautiful, traumatic, and really promising, looking at who we are deep down and what it means to have “soul.”
Directed by Peter Docter and Kemp Powers, Soul stars Jamie Foxx as a teacher named Joe Gardner whose true passion is jazz music, but his career continues failing to get off the ground. Sadly, just as he’s about to get a break, an accident involving a manhole kills him and puts his soul in what looks to be the afterlife, where he comes across another soul named 22 (Tina Fey) who no longer sees Earth as anything special.
Soul features original jazz music from Jon Batiste and a score by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (who have been busy lately), and looks like another fantastic journey into the unknown from the folks behind Coco and Inside Out. In a press statement, Docter said the plot of the film was inspired by his son and looking at how our personalities develop—looking at nature versus nurture and how much of ourselves may be instilled in us before we’re even born.
“The instant he was born, he already had a personality,” Docter said. “Where did that come from? I thought your personality developed through your interaction with the world. And yet, it was pretty clear that we’re all born with a very unique, specific sense of who we are.”
Soul arrives in theaters on June 19, 2020.
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