Pixar’s Soul: Story Supervisor Reveals Drastic Changes to Movie’s Plot

The plot of Pixar’s Soul could have ended up being much different. Story supervisor Kristine Lester spoke to Collider about the upcoming film. One of the proposed changes to Pixar’s latest entry was a shift away from a heist movie narrative. Lester name-dropped Ocean’s 11 specifically, and that would have been a vastly different feeling film than the one audiences are going to see in a few weeks. Soul‘s commercials have all positioned this effort as a plaintive journey through life and what we all want out of it. Instead, having things be a mad dash to collect elements and unite them seems unfathomable. (Not to mention this would make the movie adhere closely to the same sort of structure as Onward, which the studio also recently put out.) Check out what the comments were down below:

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. All our movies take very different paths and you’d be shocked at what you saw when stuff was early in development to where it ended up being. Sometimes they’re very, very, very different movies, and yeah, the first sketch of the movie, it was more of a heist movie that Joe was trying to go back to his life basically through, I can’t remember, doing a bunch of heist-y stuff,” Lester explained. “And I remember we came to the end of that version of the movie and it just felt like, again, like I talked about, doing honor to the subject matter and the thing that it was exploring, which is what gives life meaning, what is our purpose in life? The questions that Pete was answering. And it felt like that version of the movie wasn’t doing that justice, and so we had to take out… Okay, it’s not Ocean’s 11. What can we do to dig deeper into the thing that people really wanted to talk about?”

Check out the official synopsis for Soul below.

Soul follows Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle-school band teacher who gets the chance of a lifetime to play at the best jazz club in town. But one small misstep takes him from the streets of New York City to The Great Before – a fantastical place where new souls get their personalities, quirks, and interests before they go to Earth. Determined to return to his life, Joe teams up with a precocious soul, 22 (Tina Fey), who has never understood the appeal of the human experience. As Joe desperately tries to show 22 what’s great about living, he may just discover the answers to some of life’s most important questions.

Are you excited for Soul? Let us know down in the comments!