Pixar's hyper-existential Soul gets its first teaser

Soul, otherwise known as the Pixar film featuring a Trent Reznor score, just got its first teaser, which teases an existential journey not unlike that of the studio’s Inside Out.

Jamie Foxx lends his voice to Joe Gardner, a burgeoning jazz musician who, uh, dies after landing his dream job. In an alternate dimension, he meets another soul named 22 (Tina Fey), whose nihilism strikes uncomfortably against his own passion for art. The two then embark through “cosmic realms” to try and bring Joe back to the living world. What’s especially interesting is how the film interrogates the idea of suffering for one’s art. “For anyone who has a profession in the creative arts, it’s an almost religious obsessiveness you have to have to have success and a career in the arts,” Kemp Power, a writer and co-director on the film, told Entertainment Weekly. “At any point, no matter how happy you are doing what you do, it feels like that obsessiveness is detrimental to the rest of your life.” Gardner, producer Dana Powers continues, has “lived his whole life like he was meant to do this one thing [music] to the exclusion of pretty every other thing.” Soul, then, is about embracing the breadth of everything life has to offer.