DISNEY-Plus premiered Pixar’s new movie, ‘Soul’, on the streaming service on December 25.

In Soul, we meet Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), a Jazz pianist and a band teacher.

At the beginning of the film he gets offered a full-time role as a teacher and appears reluctant to accept it as he still has dreams to work as a musician, like his dad.

He auditions for a band and, in his joy as he leaves the theatre, he falls into a drain and is killed!

However, that’s not the end for Joe, who comes to on ‘the conveyor belt of life’, heading towards the afterlife.

Joe decides he isn’t ready to die just yet, meeting new souls as they learn their traits and personalities in The Great Before, where he meets a stubborn 22 (voiced by Tina Fey), who does not wish to go to Earth to start living as a person.

As the film progresses, we are left to wonder, can Joe cheat the system and get back to living, and will 22 ever change and decide to live a life on Earth?

There are some key observations to be made with this film. This is the first African-American protagonist in a Pixar film, but not the first African-American in all of Disney.

Princess Tiana was the first African-American protagonist, in The Princess and the Frog, where she spent most of the film as a frog, which drew some criticism.

Here, Joe becomes a blue soul within the first ten minutes, which is a worrying sign for anyone watching the film who was weary of Disney’s approach to black characters, usually casting them as side character or animals in animation.

The music, particularly the Jazz, is excellent and flows beautifully with the story – the music is transfixing and adds to the storyline and really speaks volumes about Joe and his purpose of being born to play music.

The colouring and lighting of the animation is fine; it is a reminder of a previous Pixar hit, Inside Out, which tackled the complexity of emotions, while this film tackles the complexity of existence.

This film goes incredibly far to express the sheer joy of life itself.

One of the characters finds and understands the joy in life and in the everyday; talking in the barbers, the first bite of a pizza and the noise of metal bars as you run your hand along them as you walk past.

Joe is weighed down as he attempts to find his life’s purpose, but perhaps the movie’s most enduring message is that living your life with all of the small joys can be your best-served purpose.

Soul is available to stream now on Disney Plus.