• Composed by Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Jon Batiste
• Disney / 64m

Pete Docter’s previous movie Inside Out was one of Pixar’s finest in my opinion, profound and moving and a great movie by any standards. So he had a lot to live up to in his follow-up – and has not reduced the scope of his ambition at all, with Soul being a meditation on the purpose of life told through the lens of a music teacher who longs to be a jazz performer. It’s perhaps the first Pixar movie which will not be enjoyed by children nearly as much as adults.

Music is front and centre in the film. Many had assumed Docter would continue his successful collaboration with Michael Giacchino and there was widespread arching of eyebrows when Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were announced as the film’s composers instead. Not in that press release was the fact that their music would be written for the film’s scenes in the “great beyond”, with the earthbound sequences featuring music by Jon Batiste. The curious credits are that “original score” is by Reznor and Ross and “jazz composition and arrangements” are by Batiste, but that rather undersells his contribution.

Batiste’s music is absolute the beating heart of the film. At the start it is generally source music – the album begins with a great piece “Born to Play” and not long later is the magnificent “Collard Greens and Cornbread Strut”, featuring some magnificent piano playing. Despite his odd credit, Batiste very much contributed original score as well – it’s distinctive, full of flavour and frequently quite delightful. The soft shuffle of “22’s Getaway” is great and the following “Apex Wedge” even better. Randy Newman occasionally wrote music along these lines for the earlier Pixar movies, but never quite this fully-realised as jazz.

After a great song by Cody ChesnuTT, “Parting Ways”, Batiste offers another great instrumental, “Looking at Life”, lovely and mellow. Later “The Epic Conversationalist” reprises the opening “Born to Play” in delightful fashion. The final treat comes with a new, foot-tapping performance of the classic Curtis Mayfield song “It’s All Right”, also available as a duet between Batiste and Celeste.

The Reznor and Ross music (which takes up about 40 minutes of the album) has a couple of solid moments itself – I love “Jump to Earth” in particular, which sounds like it could be from a Super Mario game, the simple piano of “22 Is Ready” is lovely, and later “Epiphany” (at 3:48 the longest track on the album) is perhaps the most impressive piece of the duo’s film music career so far, actually doing what film music is meant to do – emotionally touching, dramatically vibrant, it’s genuinely very good. The concluding “Just Us” is the other piece of note – warm-hearted and very nice.

Elsewhere there is more of the Mario sound, sometimes mixed with what sounds like someone doing an impression of Thomas Newman (Wall-E in particular) and pulling it off reasonably well. If the intention was to provide a kind of ethereal soundscape then that aim is met to an extent, but with so many of the cues being very short indeed and so, so simple, it’s only really doing anything surface-level within the film and doesn’t make much impression outside it either. I understand the intention of trying to provide contrasting soundscapes between what happens on earth and what doesn’t, but I’m sure it could have been done in a way that would have benefited the film a lot more than this does.

The music credits are probably designed to enable Reznor and Ross to win awards (in particular the Oscars, where the score wouldn’t be eligible if Batiste were also credited for his contribution). Frankly it would be a travesty if they alone were to win these things and he doesn’t share in it, but still – these things happen. There’s nothing offensive about their music – a couple of minutes of it are really good, the rest is fine but I’m fairly sure I could have written the same thing myself in a few hours – but his is sensational.

Rating: *** (** for “original score”, ***** for “jazz composition and arrangements”)

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