Does Pixar Make Kids’ Movies Anymore? - The Ringer

Following the likes of ‘Coco’ and ‘Inside Out,’ ‘Soul’ pushes the studio’s penchant for heady, existential exploration further than ever before. But is that a good thing? After watching the movie, a handful of parents explain how their children reacted to it (or didn’t).

A new Pixar movie is out, which means a few things: incredible visuals, smart-yet-funny plotlines, the arrival of a likely Best Animated Film winner. But in the past decade or so, the release of a new Pixar movie has also meant profound discussions about death, the afterlife, and human emotion. Films like Up, Coco, and Inside Out have tackled loss and depression, and have done so expertly—but at what point do movies that always have been great for kids and parents alike become more for the parents and less for the kids? Remember when the plot of a Pixar film was “cars, but they can talk” or “a rat, but it can talk and make French cuisine?”

As Pixar takes its most existential leap with Soul—a film about a man who falls into a coma and then travels to a hypothetical plane where he discovers the meaning of life—it might be worth asking who the movie is even for. So The Ringer rounded up several Ringer parents, asked them to watch the movie with their children, and then posed a series of questions. Are kids even following this apparent kids’ movie? Is Soul a movie made exclusively for adults? And why does Pixar keep insisting on making parents ugly-cry?

1. Question 1: How badly did your kid(s) want to see Soul?

Katie Baker: They had no knowledge of Soul other than having been (rightly) underwhelmed by its promotional tie-in Happy Meal toys. In general, I’d always rather my kids sit and watch one long-ish thing for awhile rather than get sucked into the vortex of show after show after autoloading show. Which leads to scenarios in which I find myself basically screaming to my beautiful boys: “THIS IS THE LAST TIME I’LL SAY IT: IT’S MOVIE OR NOTHING!” Which is all to say that when I told them we were going to watch it, their only response was to ask, eagerly, whether it was a show.

Rob Harvilla: Not that badly! Daddy talked them into it. Way more enthusiasm for The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special; way more enthusiasm for Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe; way more enthusiasm for fucking Scoob!

Jason Gallagher: My son didn’t seem too excited about the movie. Turns out 6-year-olds don’t fully comprehend the value of a studio with a rock-solid reputation among emotional parents.

2. Soul is a pretty existential movie, to say the least—how much of it was your kid picking up?

Gallagher: On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say like a 2. I was legitimately tempted to lie and say that my child is super intuitive and understood the depths of this movie. But he isn’t. His favorite part was “when that guy was a cat.” Soul went right over his head.

Baker: Early on, when Joe Gardner first found himself on the conveyor belt to the great beyond, my younger son announced: “A river!” Then my older one said, ominously, “That’s not a river, Malcolm.” I was bracing myself for a long afternoon of trying to explain the mysteries of the universe, but they kind of just rolled with everything after that.

Harvilla: Most of the early confusion was about whether anyone could play piano that well in real life, so we didn’t get around to some of the deeper philosophical aspects, no, sorry. I need to play these kids more jazz.

3. What is the deepest question your child asked you after watching Soul?

Gallagher: Can I have some more ice cream?

Harvilla: “What’s a personality?” (Daddy, almost: “It’s what makes some people jerks.”)

Baker: “Why do they eat the pizza and then just poop it out their butt?”

4. In your child’s opinion, what was the funniest part of Soul?

Baker: When they ate the pizza and pooped it out their butt. That really killed. But when I asked them afterward what the funniest part was, my 5-year-old just said: “When Soul turned into a cat.” (And as always, my 2-year-old then repeated that verbatim, just at a much higher decibel level and spraying it instead of saying it.)

Harvilla: This was not an LOL affair—we watched the first Croods movie recently and that got a way bigger reaction—but they were somewhat amused by both the unborn souls chanting “hell, hell, hell, hell” (unsophisticated) and the solitary cat ascending the staircase to the Great Beyond (more sophisticated).

Gallagher: Like I said: Far and away the talking cat.

5. In your opinion, what was the funniest part?

Harvilla: Yeah, probably the cat on the staircase (even more sophisticated when I like it).

Gallagher: The Knicks joke was perfect.

Baker: There was for sure a lot of pandering to both my sense of humor and my tortured past with those jokes about the Knicks and the soulless Wall Street bro, but for some reason it was the lady’s delivery of “the therapy cat is working!” that really got me good. Oh, and also the faces of the graduates of the “Aloof” personality school.

(Side note: When the narc-god guy was looking through file cabinets trying to balance out the soul count, I couldn’t shake the similar vibe to when Mark Zuckerberg creates FaceMash in The Social Network. Then I looked up Soul on IMDb and learned why: music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross!!! That’s not funny ha-ha, but it did lead to one extremely satisfying “Well, I’ll be damned!” chuckle, a totally underrated genre of laugh.)

6. Since Up was released in 2009, many Pixar movies have explicitly dealt with death and the afterlife—is it too much? Is it a good thing? Or does it not even register like that?

Harvilla: Up and Coco were far more intense and emotional for kids and adults both—I don’t think any aspect of Soul ever fully registered as capital-D Death, per se. Also, Joe seemed so unhappy on Earth (and had so few connections to other people) that capital-D Death didn’t even seem like his worst outcome. I suppose that makes it a less effective movie, but given that Inside Out nearly killed me, “less effective at being sad” is cool with me.

Gallagher: I personally found Soul to be a beautiful movie. Absolutely loved it. But there were times when I legitimately wondered whether this movie was made for children. Inside Out is probably the closest comparison but even that movie had enough playful elements that absolutely made it a kids’ movie. First and foremost—it’s a movie about a kid! Soul, however, is about an adult man going through an existential crisis. While I loved and appreciated that, it made the movie far less appealing to my kid, and I’m worried he won’t care much for the movie until he gets much older.

Baker: It really is a lot—I love, love, love Coco and yet I have to give myself time to recover between viewings. Even Inside Out, which isn’t “about” mortality in the same way that Coco or Up or Soul are, is essentially about the death of childhood innocence (buh-bye, Bing Bong). But in the same way I’ve genuinely used Inside Out to help explain my kids’ (and my own) emotions to them, I assume that at some point I might find myself doing something similar with some of Pixar’s other melancholy offerings. And honestly, so many kids’ movies (Bambi, Frozen, The Land Before Time) already used death as an important-yet-unprocessed plot point that it seems a lot healthier to build stories around messages of celebration, appreciation, and legacy. And I now return to my regularly scheduled weeping.

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