Soul Ending Explained: Pixar’s Meaning Of Life Revealed

Pixar’s Soul comes to an emotional conclusion after a harrowing journey between dimensions, so it’s no surprise some viewers came away from the animated Christmas Day Disney+ release with a few lingering questions. The film imagines a “Great Before,” where souls find their “spark” before joining the mortal coil and being born as babies on Earth. With such heady concepts and profound themes as the purpose of life, Soul requires some thinking before all facets of its ending fully take shape.

In Soul, down-on-his-luck jazz musician/middle school band teacher Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) finally gets what he hopes will be his big break in the competitive professional scene of New York City jazz, but just before he can seal the deal, disaster strikes. His clumsiness lands him in the space between life and death, and after meeting some zany characters, he searches tirelessly with Soul #22 (Tina Fey) for her “spark” in an effort to get back to life and fulfill his dreams. With all this interdimensional travel between manifestations of abstract concepts like the afterlife, it’s preceding counterpart the You Seminar, and even a tertiary realm called “The Zone,” it can be difficult to piece together Soul‘s big finish, but this existential story boils down to simple truths.

Despite the fact that Soul has attracted some interpretation that it is Pixar’s “first adult movie”, as with most Pixar movies, Soul explores existential ideas close to its surface, taking in mortality, the meaning of life, and what life without purpose truly means. Those questions have been a major part of Pixar’s pantheon all the way back to Toy Story, but here’s how Soul takes it all in specifically.

What Happens In Soul’s Ending

The third act sees Soul‘s lead character Joe Gardner just as he’s reached the apex of his aspirations: he’s returned to Earth after having scorned 22 by insisting any purpose she found was solely because of him, played a successful show with the Dorothea Williams Quartet, and earned the right to play with them the next day, and the next day, and so on. But still, he’s still unfulfilled; he thought the gig would be the answer to his life’s question, but he can’t help but feel like he’s missed the point.

So, he returns to The Zone, and seeks out Moonwind to make things right with 22. She has become a lost soul, tormented by the litany of chastisements from mentors past, not the least those from Joe himself. After catching hold of her, Joe braves the darkness and presents 22 with the maple leaf seed, a token of her epiphany on Earth. She understands what Joe has now realized, and what Jerry described just before he re-entered Earth: no-one has a singular purpose to which their success is bound, but it is in fact in how fully every moment is lived that determines the success of a life. Having used this realization to free 22 from her prison of self-doubt, he presents her with the Earth badge and sends her off to live her life as he prepares for the Great Beyond. After hearing about his selfless act, the Jerrys offer him a second chance at life, every day of which he resolves to spend living.

How Does Joe Get Back to the You Seminar?

But with all this traipsing between dimensions, audiences would be forgiven for wondering just how does Joe return to the You Seminar after having apparently left the Jerrys for good with 22’s Earth badge? The answer lies in his piano. Let’s recall that Moonwind and his merry pranksters each gain access to The Zone every Tuesday by meditating in whatever way they can immerse themselves (yes, even by sign-twirling). Joe’s chosen form of meditation is music, in which he regularly loses himself, like he does while auditioning for Dorothea in the first act. And so he retreats to his piano, enters the zone, and follows a wild, lost 22 through her box-portal from The Zone back to the You Seminar to achieve his true goal and make things right.

How Lost Souls and the You Seminar Work

After a year like 2020, self-doubt and apathy have become a mainstay for many folks languishing in quarantine these many months, Tina Fey’s 22 embodies on her journey to self-actualization. Soul suggests that when these feelings take hold of you, as they do 22 during the film’s climax, your soul becomes encased in a cocoon of negative feeling. Such is the two-sided coin of The Zone, as Moonbeam describes: passion can consume them in a positive way, but passions and negative feelings alike can lead a soul astray.

The You Seminar is the preceding counterpart to the afterlife. It is run by the Jerrys: various manifestations of “the coming together of all quantized fields of the universe” which take a form legible to the human mind for the benefit of Joe and the audience. Early in Soul, it’s established that it’s the You Seminar’s job to prepare souls to begin life by creating their personalities and helping them find their “spark,” but its in the third act that it becomes clear precisely what that spark is, or perhaps more importantly, what it is not. Joe operates for most of the movie on the mistaken assumption that the You Seminar is meant to give souls their singular purpose, but as a Jerry explains before Joe returns to Earth to play in the Quartet, that understanding is far too simplistic.

Joe and 22’s Unlikely Friendship

Joe, as described by Jamie Foxx, has spent all his life believing that his one true passion is music and that he must become a successful musician if his life is to have any meaning. What he learns over the course of the film is that his life has no singular purpose—no one’s does. Instead, it’s how individuals choose to approach everything that they do that provides their lives with meaning. He comes to this realization with the help of 22, who herself must undergo a change of approach. She begins the movie thinking life on Earth to be overrated and not worth the trouble, but after having seen the world through Joe’s passionate perspective, her vitality emerges and she, like Joe, resolves to live.

The Real Meaning Of Soul’s Ending

This is the message writer/director Pete Docter hopes to leave with audiences: lives don’t boil down to some binary success or failure, but rather it’s in the way each moment is lived, no matter how small, that gives all time on Earth meaning. Furthermore, the film’s exploration of lost souls through 22’s incapacitating pessimism touches on themes of self-worth, which producer Dana Murray describes as learning to love one’s self. The ethereal film continues the existential discussions from Docter’s 2015 effort Inside Out, but rest assured, Soul stands on its own two feet as another intriguing investigation into the mortal experience. Hopefully, the film helped provide some understanding to the lost souls out in this crazy 2020 world, as hopefully this explainer helped provide some clarity to one of the year’s most celebrated films.

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