FILMS

Mank is a labour of love, steeped in lavishly baroque visual style

SOUL Pixar’s latest feature shows the studio very much in ruminative Meaning Of Life mode. It’s as close as digital animation comes to being a mindfulness seminar or a full-blown treatise in cosmology – but don’t worry, it still has a funny talking cat. It’s directed and co-written by Pete Docter, whose Inside Out – a pop-art mapping of theories of the self – was the studio’s most outré to date. In Soul, he sticks his neck out even further.

Pixar’s first African-American-themed feature, it focuses on Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a middle-aged Harlem music teacher who feels he’s missed his vocation as a jazz pianist. One day, he gets his big chance to accompany a saxophone legend (voiced by Angela Bassett). But. He finds himself mentoring novice soul ‘22’ (Tina Fey), a wiseacre little tyke, and the two return to Earth in a bizarre body-swap incident, pursued by a character who’s essentially a collection of wiggly lines…