Spoilers! Why 'Soul' filmmakers decided on that powerful ending (and nixed many others)
Spoiler alert! The following details the ending of the new Pixar/Disney+ movie "Soul," so beware if you haven't watched it yet.
Pixar’s new animated “Soul” takes a middle-school band teacher to the afterlife and back, though the ending is by comparison fairly simple yet powerful.
Directed by Pete Docter (“Inside Out”), “Soul” (streaming now on Disney+) is the story of how Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) has a freak, nearly fatal accident after getting a sweet gig with famous jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). He lands in the hereafter, meets a soul named 22 (Tina Fey) in The Great Before, and goes on a body-swapping quest that teaches both main characters about the joys of being human.
When it doesn’t look like 22 will be able to be born on Earth, Joe gives up his own shot to return to his existence so 22 can live – a sacrifice that doesn’t go unnoticed. The powers-that-be in The Great Before also allow Joe to return to Earth, having had a crash course on what really matters.
When a soul counselor asks him how he’s going to spend his life, Joe responds, “I’m not sure. But I do know I’m going to live every minute of it." He steps out of his house, takes a satisfying breath and smiles before the film cuts to the “Soul” logo and the credits begin.
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That was the perfect finale for Joe, says “Soul” co-writer and co-director Kemp Powers, though “we had to try out some other things before we finally landed on that.”
Docter and Powers considered a bunch of different endings for Joe and 22. Docter acknowledges there were versions where Joe died or didn't get to go back to his life.
“We felt that he had learned enough to appreciate the things that he didn't value to begin with,” Docter says. “And that's why we felt like, ‘Oh, that could work.' It felt very noble that he's sort of sacrificing his chance to go back and instead handing it off to 22.
“But as it turned out, so much of the film was about him learning for the first time that, ‘Hey, wait a minute. My barber has a whole life that I didn't know anything about. I didn't know that I could be honest and truthful with my mom.’ It felt like it was robbing him to not allow him to go back.”
One of the epilogues they thought about was a post-credit sequence that showed what happened to Mr. Mittens, the cat whose body Joe ended up in for a while. Another featured an unlikely reunion, Powers says. “There was one where Joe was touring with Dorothea and teaching students privately on the side, and 22 was a new student and he recognized that it was her.”
The audience never gets to see what happened to 22, but every time they considered showing where she wound up or what Joe decided to do next, “there was something innately not satisfying about it,” Power says.
“We know that audiences often want to be told exactly what happened to the character. They want to know that the character made the 'right' decision. But in the case of Joe, we didn't want to put a choice on him. We wanted to say that regardless of what he ended up doing, whether it was going back to teaching, playing in a band or some hybrid of both, he just appreciated life better.”
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Soul' on Disney+: Why Pixar chose that powerful ending (spoilers!)
