Pixar’s latest movie is about what happens before we’re born and after we die—and right now, it just might be the movie we need to remind us that the struggle of living is worth it.
The new trailer for Soul introduces us to Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Fox), a middle school music teacher who is on the verge of realizing his dream of playing jazz professionally when he suffers an accidental death and finds himself in the afterlife.
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Like the Land of the Dead in Pixar’s Coco, the post-mortal world of Soul seems to have its own rules and bureaucracy, which Joe quickly runs afoul of when he rejects the light at the end of the tunnel and accidentally falls into “The Great Before,” the space where souls form their personalities before they are born as humans.
There, Joe meets an unborn soul (voiced by Tina Fey) who is already tired of the life she has yet to live: “Is all this living worth dying for?” she asks him. It’s up to Joe to convince her that yes, yes it is, even when things are hard—and that’s a lesson we could all stand to be reminded of right about now.
In the trailer, the main point Joe comes up with in favor enduring the struggle of existence is pizza, which admittedly makes for a pretty good argument, but we can expect the full film to make a stronger case. Like Coco, Soul seems to be a movie about death that is mostly about embracing life, and that’s a message we need more than ever in 2020.
Soul is due in theaters on June 19.
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