MAJOR SPOILERS. If you have not seen @PixarSoul skip this.
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In the final minutes of Soul, as 22 plummets toward earth, ready to be born for the first time, I thought: it won't remember. It won't have a choice about where it's born or who it's born to.

There's no telling where it will land, whether it will be born to wealth or poverty, where it will fall on spectrum of gender and sexuality. It has a core personality, which it will need to manage whatever circumstances it finds itself in.

The rest is just fucking random.

Because life. But let's circle back to that.

I am the son of a great jazz musician. When my Dad was 19, he hit the road with Louis Armstrong as his pianist, and eventually his band leader.

My Dad was given music instruction from before he could form complete sentences by my grandfather, a brilliant musician in his own right who, as a Black immigrant in 1920, could only get work as a piano tuner.

Dad could read music before he could read.

By four years old he was playing Mozart scales in the dark. By six he gave his first concerto. By eight he'd written his first composition.

While he mostly played piano, as a professional he mastered over a dozen instruments:

Organ, flute, saxophone, drums, violin, viola, cello, harmonica, xylophone, vibraphone, etc.

My Dad was THAT guy. A legit musical genius.

He's also the guy that fell in love with my Mom, a force in her own right. Which meant his career was often at odds with his family life.

The early days with Armstrong were good, and he bounced around the greats. Ella, Billie, Sarah, Duke: Dad played with them all.

As a young man. The options for a middle-aged, married jazz musician, with kids and a mortgage, are vastly different.

Dad opened a vocal coaching studio. Eartha Kitt and Dakota Staton were among his clientele. He was the original musical director for the Supremes, before he quit the gig because it was too much time away from family.

At one point, he gave away a musical lick that would become one of the most recognizable songs of the 20th century.

Dad was a prodigious talent who faced limited opportunities because of an inherently racist system, who managed to keep his integrity and his wife.

At a certain point in his 50s, Dad took a part-time gig as a middle school band leader. It was regular income and provided a modicum of stability. Eventually he would go back to school and get a master's degree in music.

Not because he needed it, but because it upped his meager school salary.

As a childless 50something still pursuing my own dreams, I can't imagine what this must have done to my Dad's spirit.
Dad worked at the school during the day, composed at night, & gigged on the weekends.

He recorded his first album of his own music at seventy-five years of age.

He'd been forced to retire from the school system by then, and was touring with a band called the Harlem Jazz Legends: a group of octogenarians who were once session players for legends.

Fats Waller's guitarist. Frank Sinatra's drummer. Louis Armstrong's pianist (my Dad).

Dad had four gigs the weekend before he was hospitalized for advanced prostate cancer. Two on a Saturday, two on Sunday. I drove him to all four.

In the hospital he talked about getting out so he could record his next album.

He didn't fall into an open manhole. He died of cancer.

At a certain point in my teenage years, I remember finding a book in my Dad's library called "How to Make $30,000 a Year as a Musician."

The job that crushed his soul was the job that put food on my table and a roof over my head, and somehow Dad never let go of his dreams, of his music.

I know this movie because I've seen it all my life.

I know musicians who are there right now: infinitely talented, been thisclose for longer than they care to admit, family pressuring them to get "a real job," making choices between family life and career, wondering if they can have it all, or any part of it.

People trying to live AND live their dreams.

Which brings us back to 22. A lot of Black folx I genuinely admire are upset about a white woman co-opting the body of a Black man on the verge of his dreams. But that's the thing: 22 isn't a white woman:

It's an unborn soul.

It's a genderless, amorphous blob of potential that exists in a place run by "the coming together of all quantized fields of the universe." When questioned, 22 admits it only uses the voice of a white woman to annoy people.

22 is lazy, selfish, and self absorbed.

But it isn't white or a woman.

Which brings us back to the beginning: this asshole of a soul hurtling towards earth where statistically it's more likely to land in Bangladesh than Bushwick.

All of this to say: from the respectful way in which jazz is represented, to the gorgeous way NYC is its own character, I loved this movie. It resonated in a way few others have.

I saw my grandfather, my Dad, myself, and many friends reflected in this.

Would I like to see a movie where a Black person gets to stay a Black person for the duration of the movie and isn't a vehicle for a white person's growth?

Well sure. But I won't let that interfere with everything else I love about this.

The textures, the sounds, the busybody aunties that need to mind their bidness.

And ultimately the message: it's all random. Don't let life crush your dreams. @PixarSoul #PixarSoul