After studying high school band teacher and aspiring jazz musician Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) through an existential crisis and on an adventure through the wild worlds of The Great Beyond and The Great Before, Pixar’s Soul gives him a happy ending appropriately. However, as co-directors and co-writers Pete Docter and Powers of Kemp revealed on the advertising tour that preceded the launch of Soul, there were several alternative endings that would have been much sadder. In addition, there were some ideas that would have further wrapped up the story of some other characters.
Find out more about some of the Soul alternative endings below, but watch out for main spoilers.
At Pixar’s Soul, after getting the kind of jazz show he has been waiting for all his life, Joe Gardner accidentally falls to his death, taking him to The Great Beyond’s waiting list. But instead of going where it should, it ends up in the Great Before, the ethereal plane where souls get their personalities. Confused by a mentor who helps new souls, Joe is tasked with helping a soul called 22 (Tina Fey) find his spark so he can start life on Earth, which he sees as his only way to potentially return to his life on Earth. The only problem is that 22 is determined to stay on The Great Before and has had countless mentors before him.
After a hasty solution brought Joe and 22 to Earth without completing his task, Joe finds himself in the body of a therapy cat named Mr. Mittens and 22 is inside Joe’s body, giving us a classic body change scenario. As they experience life in this way, 22 realizes that life on Earth is much better than she initially thought, and Joe realizes that what is really important in life is simply enjoying it, instead of becoming obsessed with what you believe to be your purpose. When the time comes to return to The Great Before to rectify his challenge to the rules, Joe has a chance to return to Earth, but he gives up so that 22 can finally live his own life on Earth.
In the end, Joe still has the opportunity to return to Earth by the Great Before overseers, The Jerry. One of Jerry asks how Joe will spend the rest of his life and Joe simply says, “I’m not sure. But I know that I will live every minute of it. ”Although we never see exactly what it means, Joe steps out of his building’s front door and takes a deep breath of fresh air.
It is a moving conclusion, but we almost saw one that reached a little more difficult and sadder, because there were several alternative endings in which Joe would have died instead of returning to Earth. Speaking to Collider, Kemp Powers explained that there were many iterations of Soul with death ending Joe’s story. Remembered powers:
“We made several versions of Joe dying in the end and staying dead, in all different ways. Some of them were much more emotional. Some of them were funny. We did a lot of different endings. “
At USA Today, Pete Docter said that these endings made Joe learn the same lesson, but his sacrifice of not returning to Earth was not reversed in the end. The director said:
“We feel that he had learned enough to appreciate the things he didn’t value to begin with. And that’s why we think, ‘Oh, it can work.’ It seemed very noble that he was sacrificing his chance to return and instead handing it over to 22. But as it turned out, much of the film was about him learning for the first time that, ‘Hey, wait a minute. My barber has a lifetime that I knew nothing about. I didn’t know that I could be honest and truthful with my mom. ‘It looked like he was stealing not to allow him to come back. “
If Joe had not been allowed to return to Earth, he would certainly have made the lesson he learned bittersweet. Joe would never have had a chance to rectify his myopic view of life and really enjoy it with new eyes. This was undoubtedly the right decision and led to a much more uplifting conclusion. The ambiguous nature of the ending is even more satisfying than seeing where Joe chose to take his life next. Powers explained the thinking process behind this decision:
“We know that the audience usually wants to hear exactly what happened to the character. They want to know if the character made the “right” decision. But in Joe’s case, we didn’t want to put a choice on him. We wanted to say that regardless of what he ended up doing, whether he went back to teaching, playing in a band or some hybrid of both, he just enjoyed life better. “
Just as Joe’s story is still open when it comes to what he chooses to do with his future, the soul named 22 receives the same treatment. Although we know that 22 is going to live a life on Earth, we have no idea how it plays out. But Powers said there were other endings where we saw what happened to her. The filmmaker elaborated:
“There was one where Joe was touring with Dorothea and teaching students privately, and 22 was a new student and he recognized it as her.”
So, why didn’t they move on anyway? Each time they invented an epilogue, they changed their minds. Powers explained that “there was something innately unsatisfactory about it”. Considering that Joe’s ending was much more satisfying without a definitive choice for the next phase of his life, I think doing the same with 22 was a smart decision too.
Therapy cat Mr. Mittens almost had a post-credit sequence that would have revealed where he ended up. But in the end, Powers and Docter decided that the audience shouldn’t see where none of the characters actually ended up.
Rather than, Soul it was left to be about the little moments that make up our lives instead of where we ended up, and that’s what makes the film resonate so well.
Pixar’s Soul is now available on Disney +.
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