Assignment 17- Option 2 - Palmer Lee

Soul is fine. It's fine. It did what it wanted to do, and while I would've much rather watched a movie about a jazz teacher trying to make it big, what was there was done well. The voice acting and animation were very good, as can be expected from Pixar. But, I have one really big issue with it that stopped me from being able to like this movie. The only other animated Disney movie with a Black protagonist is The Princess and the Frog. While this is also a good movie, Tiana spends most of the movie as a frog. In Soul, Joe Gardner spends most of the movie as either a fish-looking soul being or a cat. Whether they realize they're doing it or not, Disney is dehumanizing Black characters. You would think in 2020 a corporation as big and as influential as Disney would maybe go, "Hey, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't have both of our only two black protagonists be animals." For this reason, I could not bring myself to like Soul.