Soul (2020) poster
2020 · animation · family · drama

Soul

Directed by Pete Docter1h 41m2020
ElsewhereIMDb8.0442kRT95%Metacritic83TMDB8.111k
  • warm
  • redemptive
  • tender
Movie DNA

Warm, steady, gentle animation / family, inventive in texture. Redemptive, mid-stakes, tender, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher with a love for jazz music. After a successful audition at the Half Note Club, he suddenly gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and is transported to the You Seminar, a center in which souls develop and gain passions before being transported to a newborn child. Joe must enlist help from the other souls-in-training, like 22, a soul who has spent eons in the You Seminar, in order to get back to Earth.

Our read · Soul (2020) reads as a warm, steady, inventive animation · family · drama entry — gentle in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, tender in temperature, redemptive in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

Where the cast leads
Fingerprint

The shape of Soul

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a gentle Pixar meditation on purpose, jazz, and ordinary joy.

ends warmit stays with youmeditativegrips by minute 15attention 4/5breezes by
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around

Skip it tonightYou came for nonstop laughs—this is reflective and existential.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
Nearest by DNA

Eight films that read most like this one.

Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”

Your take
Rate it
star-clip-1-0star-clip-2-0star-clip-3-0star-clip-4-0star-clip-5-0
React
Discussion

Discussion

cmd enter to post

What does your Movie DNA look like?

Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.

Calibrate yourself