Fridge / Soul

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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Fridge Brilliance

• Seeing the Lost Souls wandering about obsessed with something that is stopping them from living; it really does make sense that in the end, the 'Spark' is just about living, not about one's purpose in life.
• Why did none of the Jerries acknowledge the physical differences between Joe and Dr. Borgensson, despite Joe not resembling the doctor at all? While most mentors still somewhat resemble the people they use to be, all souls have the ability to change their appearances and voices if they want to. The Jerries likely figured he chose to look like that and didn't question it.
  • It's later shown that at least one Jerry did know it was Joe instead, when they say he's the one mentoring 22 to Terry. So they also may have just rolled with it.
  • Also, why the Jerries were so eager for the doctor: he was a famous child psychologist. They have figured he had the best chance of getting through to 22.
• Fridge-Funny: Terry telling the audience to "go home" in The Stinger may be ironic (or even harsh) since they're already home for the quarantine. However, this takes on another level of brilliance when you realize: watching a movie can also take you into the Zone. In other words, Terry is telling our souls to leave the Zone and go home.
• The movie's poster showing Joe and what appears to be a cat sidekick feels like a case of Covers Always Lie, but it's actually brilliant. 22 being in Joe's body and Joe being in the cat's body is so convincing, it even fooled us as the audience!
• When Joe looks through his memories the first time, it's under spotlights of blue, fittingly symbolizing his love for Jazz music, or "the blues". But it makes his life look unaccomplished and pathetic and sad, which also parallels how he's so obsessed with his dream of being an accomplished Jazz musician that he isn't appreciating life as is. In other words, the blues is keeping Joe from seeing the good in his life.
• Souls notably gain a one-eyed appearance when they become obsessed. This may seem like a simple design meant to make obsessed souls look alien, which is unto itself brilliant. But it also has another meaning: it's meant to reflect how obsessed souls are with the subject of their obsession, how they've gained tunnel-vision.
• One has to wonder why all these amazing people (Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, etc.) couldn't inspire 22 to get a spark. Then it occurs, they're all accomplished people! Their very presence set an impossibly high standard for 22, planting the idea that you have to be talented and famous in order to be worthwhile on Earth. It had to be an everyman like Joe Gardner who (unwittingly) inspired 22 that she doesn't have to be accomplished in order to love life.
  • Except that Abraham Lincoln was known to be hard on himself and depressed and Mother Teresa was a trained teacher.
  • With that, perhaps Abraham Lincoln's self-deprecation rubbed off on 22 and he was very hard on her as well, unintentionally instilling her with guilt that she'll always be a nobody. This also explains why Lincoln is one of the biggest "critics" in 22's head when she becomes a Lost Soul, which may mean that when he was her teacher, he could have been the most hard on her.
  • Mother Teresa on the other hand, was indeed a trained teacher, but 22 is by no means a conventional student, as she initially holds no interest in living on Earth, and doesn't seem to learn the same way humans would, given that she is a Newborn Soul with no learned empathy or interest in specific hobbies. No wonder she manages to be so infuriating that Mother Teresa's patience wears thin.
• Dez wanted to be a veterinarian before he became a barber. This may explain why he's accepting of "Joe" (22) wanting the cat (the real Joe) to stick around.
• Abraham Lincoln gets angry when 22 says that Andrew Jackson was on the twenty-dollar bill. Think about the historical context—Lincoln was the president who ended the slavery of African Americans in the US, while Andrew Jackson's policies against Native Americans led to the Trail of Tears! Of course someone who fought against bigotry is going to be angry to hear that they put someone like Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill!
  • There's also the point that they're the first Republican and Democratic Presidents, respectively.
• The unborn souls are little more than vague circular blobs, while the dead souls all have distinctive features such as hairstyles and clothing. It makes sense since the dead souls are carrying over certain things that helped form their identities, which the unborn souls don't have yet.
• It seems strange that Number 22 seems to have an oddly distinctive personality when all the other unborn souls are little more than giggly babies. However she's had a personality encoded in her for a long time—all the circles in her patch (except her spark) were filled in, meaning she'd been assigned her personality well beforehand. She just didn't have that final component, her spark.
• With the knowledge that your spark is your inspiration to live, not your purpose, the gag with the unborn soul getting their spark after being hit on the head with a soccer ball actually makes sense—the sensation that must have awakened their spark was the thrill that came from being hit by the ball. An adrenaline rush (or the equivalent, so to speak) would definitely fill you with the desire to live.
• Despite behaving like and being treated as a child, 22 has been around for a long time, and has built up more than her fair share of cynicism—but she also has flashes of insight and wisdom that would be quite unusual for a kid. She's literally an old-soul.
• The newborn soul introduced before 22 has their number in the one hundred billions. Makes sense, since it's estimated that about 108 billion people have ever lived. The implication that a new soul's number is indicative of when they were created also emphasizes how long 22 has been in the Great Before — she's the 22nd human soul ever, and she's existed for about 5 million years.
• The movie is a "Just So" Story for why some people seem Born in the Wrong Century or nostalgically long for another era in history — like 22, they took longer to develop (though probably not nearly as long as her), and had mentors from decades if not centuries ago with very different values and morals from the world they're born in.
• The Jerrys giving Joe a second chance at life isn't a cop-out: Joe says in the beginning that "I would die a happy man if I could perform with Dorothea Williams." He performs, then proceeds to do something he knows will lead to his death, and he claims he's perfectly okay with that. But the lesson he learned and explained to 22 is that your passion should not be your only purpose or source of joy or reason for living. Him dying after getting to live his dream would have completely undermined the message that everything about life makes it worth living, not only your one dream. The movie wasn't the story of a selfish person learning to care about others and eventually having said person being willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for another before being told "We've been preaching sacrifice but will let it slide this time!" The movie was about someone wrapped up in something learning to appreciate more aspects of life — it would be wrong for a movie that preaches "appreciate life" to end by taking away the life of the person who had just learned that. By sending him to live, the Jerries told him, "You got it right. Now go be a mentor to other souls on your plane."
• The movie starts with Joe being promoted from part-time to full-time teacher and wondering if he should take the job or not. Events force him to disguise himself as a "mentor" (in other words, a teacher), and all he wants is to get out of his position and be free. However, after he's no longer a mentor, he goes back to teach a student something important. This can be interpreted two ways: his arc was a large-scale version of his promotion, or the promotion was a small-scale foreshadowing of his future role as a mentor (which implies that he will take the job, since teaching seems to be just as much "what he was born to do" as music is).
• A viewer interprets that the Close on Title isn't just for aesthetics. It is to also show that this is where Joe's life really starts. As in where his story begins.
• The presence of all the Historical Domain Characters as mentors implies that entering the Great Beyond at least wouldn't have resulted in Cessation of Existence. We never did see how a soul became chosen for the mentor role in the first place...
• Why can Joe go back to Earth on multiple counts and even jump off the soul escalator? His body is still alive, so technically he is right when he said that he isn't supposed to be here!
• In a way, it's fitting that the movie ends without revealing whether Joe will choose to be a musician or a teacher. Both of those things are what he thought his purpose was (or, in the case of being a teacher, was not). However, the movie shows that the point of life isn't your purpose, it's how you live it. What he does afterward doesn't matter—he's already learned the most important lesson (live your life to the fullest), so for the audience, seeing the rest simply isn't necessary.
• Jerry intended to assign 22 to a Psychologist that was skilled enough to win a Nobel Prize. This was probably their last ditch effort to find someone who could get to the root of what 22's issue is and why she didn't want to go to earth, and from there help figure out how to motivate her to want to live her own life. Who better to do that than someone who dedicated their life to helping others through their problems?
• Joe falls victim to The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body during his experience as a cat, such as napping in sunlight or chasing a light point around. This could explain why he was so insistent that 22's experiences were because she was stuck in Joe's body; he acted like a cat when he was a cat, so he assumed 22's actions were more of the same.
• The way the conveyor belt to the Great Beyond is portrayed echoes the movie's themes of music. From above, the conveyor belt looks like a musical staff on a piece of sheet music, with the souls representing notes on the staff. And when Joe falls into the Great Before, the abstract shapes he falls through resemble the visual appearance of sound waves or the strings on a guitar. Since music is Joe's life, it would make sense that he interprets the afterlife as a visual representation of music and sound.
• None of the Newborn Soul has legs (with the exception of 22 when she shapeshift into Joe for a moment), this is because they don't need them in the Great Before, and when they are born as people, their baby legs will still need time to develop and be strong enough to start learning to walk.
• It makes a weird sort of sense that Moonwind can get into "the zone" while sign-spinning and listening to music. Doing something sort of monotonous that you don't need to think too hard about once you get into the rhythm, but still keeps you active, can be surprisingly helpful for thinking—some authors find it helpful to go for a run when they have writer's block for the same reason.
• When Joe first possesses the body of the cat, we cut back to the conveyor belt leading to the Great Beyond to see the cat's soul, implying that it died. However, when Joe returns after being given 22's pass, the cat is shown to be alive. Plot hole? No. Cats have nine lives, after all.
• A "Jerry" is also an idiom for a mistake or an error. The Jerries may be astral beings beyond our comprehension, but they make mistakes. 22 is the result of their cumulative errors, but they're also seen sending unborn souls purposefully into undesirable personality traits (like being self-absorbed) in numbers perhaps a little too large, or letting an unborn soul have little to no redeeming qualities (like the one shaping up to become The Sociopath). A lot of that can be chalked up to their Blue-and-Orange Morality, but shows that they aren't infaillible beings.
  • Then, what about Terry? Terry hates the thought of making even a single mistake in their calculations, and immediately goes on a quest to set the record straight by chasing after the soul that tried to escape. They also attempt to correct to the best of their ability the other mistake they make during said quest (namely, capturing the wrong soul). This trait sets them apart from the Jerries in major ways.
• At the end of the movie when 22 finally goes to Earth, her Earth Pass starts beeping. There are two ways to look at this. The first is that the Earth Pass is acting like a homing beacon for 22's body. The other is that it's symbolic of a her heart beginning to beat.
• May cross over with Fridge Horror, but Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi not only giving up on 22, but being so harsh on her she developed self-loathing issues makes a little more sense come their less-than-virtuous sides coming to light in recent years.
• Why does 22 Freak Out when Joe accidentally scratches her... Souls Feel No Pain and have Complete Immortality. Of course she would have a breakdown upon feeling pain for the first time in a millenia long existence, a concept she couldn't fanthom.
• Joe believes a spark is a soul's purpose and that his own spark is music. But remember, he didn't come into the world with a passion for jazz music. He hated it until his father got him to give him a chance. His love of music was formed due to his experiences on earth, not imprinted onto him by the You Seminar. Whether its his purpose or just his passion, it cannot be his spark.

Fridge Horror

• What would have happened back on Earth if the Jerries hadn't given Joe another shot at life? Would he have been found in his apartment, presumed dead of a heart attack on the evening of his greatest triumph? Or worse, would people have assumed he had committed suicide because he found the moment of his big break somewhat unsatisfying?
  • Most likely, people would assume that suffering a severe accident, then abruptly checking himself out of hospital in order to play a gig, had been too much for him.
• Joe wasn't even biologically dead when he first journeyed to the escalator. Whichever systems governed the afterlife actively decided whatever brain damage he had would (likely) kill him. Every human who's fallen into a coma they can't wake up from could have woken up just fine if the people in the afterlife allowed it.
  • That is, of course, unless it wasn't a coma. The absolute definition of "death" isn't concrete, so it might not mean the same to the You-Seminar as it does to us. While by human definition, Joe may not have been dead until all of his bodily functions have ceased, but to the You-Seminar he was injured with no chance of survival. So to humans he could have theoretically been alive, to the You-Seminar he died on impact, and his soul returning would have been cheating death.
  • Perhaps the fact that his body was still technically alive is what allowed him to jump off the conveyor belt in the first place. Anyone who was genuinely dead wouldn't be able to get past the force-field-thingy, leaving them stuck there until the light gets them. His fate wasn't being decided for him, because he could still get out if he tried hard enough.
• Considering just how many souls there are, it's very likely that Joe isn't the first person to panic on the soul escalator and try to bail. What would happen to them if they weren't lucky enough to cut through all the intangible matter? In fact, given that Terry is upset with Joe's escape because it's the first time in centuries a soul has gone missing, what happened to them that they were no longer counted as "souls" to Terry?
  • Perhaps this can be Soul's In-Universe explanation for the existence of ghosts, spirits, and poltergeists. They are not living beings like Joe because they don't have a body, but they are also not souls because of their presence on Earth. While mystics and shamans like Moonwind may be able to interact with them to some degree, who's to say that spirit mediums, necromancers, and Ghostbusters can do the same?
• Where is the real Dr. Borgensson? Even after revealing that Joe took his place, the Jerries never tried to look for him.
• Paul's accidental Near-Death Experience thanks to Terry pretty much scarred him for life. Unless he runs into someone like Moonwind for help, as normal therapists will just usually write him off as delusional, he is going to be traumatized and live with a fear of death for the rest of his life. Which, considering his psyche, might not be very long...
  • Many people who've claimed to have encounters with UFOs or other supernatural forces haven't necessarily been traumatized by it, they just tell outlandish stories that nobody believes. While nobody he knows will believe his story about his encounter with Terry (with the possible exception of Joe), he'll probably be fine and see it as an odd experience he had.
• As these commenters pointed out, 22's constant messing with people in the Zone has probably caused at least some fatalities.
  The Foolish Jester: I hope 22 has standards and doesn’t put people in danger, like surgeons, people driving or racing, etc
  Noelle Rutledge's reply: My first instinct would be to agree with the other two commenters, but then I realized something. 22 literally does not value life, at all, in any way. Nor does she respect that other people do (her many many many mentors who she mocked and drove to insanity) and thought Joe was insane for wanting his life back. She had 0 respect for life, and did not value it at all. I doubt Pixar would ever actually go there, but I don't think we can really make the argument that she has standards here.
  • Even if 22 somehow hasn't killed anyone by doing this, knocking out that tattoo artist resulted in the tattoo being messed up and someone being disfigured, and it's entirely possible that the basketball player that she knocked out of the zone got injured from messing up his slam dunk and dropping to the ground. She clearly doesn't care if anyone is harmed, so her not caring if anyone dies isn't much of a stretch.
• What would have happened if Joe hadn't fallen into that hatch? He would have still performed at the concert, realized it didn't change his life as he hoped it would, and would have been left depressed and directionless, but without memories of 22 to help him snap out of it. And 22 would still have remained at the Great Before for who knows how many more millennia.
• Either that huge ball of light in the Great Beyond teleports you to Heaven or completely vaporizes you into nothingness. Eventually Joe will have to go into it.
• There is no indication 22 and the other souls get to keep their memories once they become human, which means...she will have no memory of Joe and the things she learned in the movie.

Fridge Logic

• So no one else in recent history has ever freaked out about being dead and tried to get off the soul escalator before? No one, for hundreds of years, has been so desperate to get off that they jumped from the escalator, went through the trippy reality warping folds of the time-space continuum, and landed in the Great Before? If Joe was desperate to get back for something as relatively small as an audition, then surely someone with more important reasons, such as a family or a mission bigger than themselves, would have already caused a similar scenario and messed up Terry's count beforehand. Yet Terry and all the Jerrys seem to treat Joe's escape as a huge deal. Knowing how humans operate, that really seems unrealistic.
  • Terry is the only one who seems to treat it as a serious matter, the Jerrys act concerned but don't seem to actually do anything about it unless forced to. And considering how Terry is easily distracted to "fudge" her count (not to mention the time she spent in the archives and hunting for Joe), it's easy to believe this has happened plenty of times in the past, with Terry none the wiser.
• When Joe landed in the cat's body, the cat's soul went up into the Great Beyond. Yet when Joe finally gets out of the cat's body, it wakes up as its old self, its soul returned. Does that mean some souls can come back from the Great Beyond? Why does the cat's soul, of all the souls in the world, return to the land of the living just because its body was vacant? Wouldn't that mess up Terry's count?
  • Who's to say how time works in the spirit world? Maybe the cat had been on the spirit escalator the entire time and was returned to its body when Joe left it.
  • It is possible that Terry also got the cat's soul back to correct the count.
  • Or maybe it's just a joke about cats having nine lives!
    • Word of God confirms that it's this, they just had to cut the scene explaining it.
  • Some theologians propose that animals do not have souls in the way humans do, notably Hans Christian Andersen. This makes the situation even more bizarre, as we also see no other animal souls in the entire film. And considering that indeed Joe's soul escaped, I suppose the cat's souls coming back came under the same conditions as Joe. Perhaps the cat is actually an Alebrije? Disguising as normal animals seems to be an innate ability for them, anyways...
• While the Jerrys lean more towards benevolence, they're still very much Above Good and Evil, giving new souls bad traits and at one point one Jerry laughs that a soul with all the traits of a sociopath will be Earth's problem to deal with, not theirs. So it's not impossible that history's worst monsters were mentors, especially for souls who were given more negative traits than good ones.

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