Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Soul

It’s a shame the pandemic hit when it did. Soul is Pixar’s best film since Inside Out and stands easily within the upper echelons of their all-time output. A theatrical release would have befitted this meditative film about finding one’s purpose in life and igniting one’s spark. In the hands of experienced director Pete Docter and neophyte co-director Kemp Powers, the material bursts from the screen.

The story is about a middle school band teacher Joe (Jamie Foxx) who longs for a career as a jazz musician, but cannot seem to find the right break. When an accident sends him into the afterlife, his push to return to earth and play in the gig of his career puts him on a collision course with 22 (Tina Fey), a soul who cannot seem to find the spark that will allow her to join her fellow new souls to a life on earth. Paired with Joe, they hatch a plan to get them back to earth, which meets another setback when they return with 22 in Joe’s body and Joe in the body of a cat. Will the duo find a way to reverse the body swap before the abacus-counting Terry (Rachel House) drags them both back.

Foxx’s vocal style doesn’t always fit the self-conscious teacher who longs to be a working jazz pianist, but he makes most of it work. Fey delivers a performance that’s almost unrecognizable as the dismissive and adrift 22. Her typical comedic style is subsumed by the role giving it personality and energy. Richard Ayoade and Alice Braga deliver wonderful support as two soul shepherds while Angela Bassett and Phylicia Rashad remain magnificently dependable in their roles as a popular jazz saxophonist and Joe’s mother respectively.

Luca

Minor Pixar to be sure, Luca doesn’t fall into the category of abject failure like The Good Dinosaur, but it still feels like a half-finished work rushed through a production pipeline by an untested young director. Enrico Casarosa may have had a senior role in films like Toy Story 4, Incredibles 2, and Coco, but those films don’t seem to have influenced his style with Luca, but his wonderful Oscar-nominated short film, La Luna, certainly does.

Neophyte directors have a tendency to play to their strengths and inventiveness is certainly one of Casarosa’s best talents. The story revolves around a pair of sea creatures who look human when their fins and scales are dry. Jacob Tremblay voices the titular Luca, a mercreature longing for adventure in the great wide somewhere. It’s a defining characteristic of many of Disney’s numerous animated heroes, but the idea isn’t a common theme in Pixar’s wheelhouse, which may explain why this film feels like mid-tier Disney as well.

In his quest for adventure, Luca meets Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) whose father has left him behind, so the “kid” searches for dry-land trinkets to adorn his dilapidated parapet home. The pair become fast friends and as Luca becomes frustrated by his insular parents, they go undercover as human children in a small seaside village where sea monsters are feared and hunted, though no one has captured one yet. There, they meet a young girl Giulia (Emma Berman) and the trio form a solid friendship until Alberto begins to feel marginalized as Luca becomes enamored with Giulia’s informative personality and their plans to travel the world on a Vespa begin to collapse.

The opening sequence, and subsequent adventures, feel a bit like The Little Mermaid, which was also about an undersea creature who longed to be where the people were. The only difference here is Luca and Alberto, and the rest of their species become human when on dry land where as Ariel had to give up her voice to an evil queen for the privilege. While the similarities largely end there, it’s hard to get away from the pall that hangs over the production of being a male-centric Little Mermaid-esque adventure.

Luca employs vibrant animation and the story is ultimately fulfilling emotionally, but it cannot escape the overwhelming sense of predictability. It’s the kind of film that might have fit better in the Disney wheelhouse rather than the Pixar family of films, largely because we’ve set so many high expectations of Pixar that even gentle, modestly involving kids’ fare can feel ill-fitting.