Disney and Pixar’s Soul was the big winner on Sunday night’s Golden Globes and took home two Golden Globes. The two awards were for Best Animated Feature and also Best Original Score.
For Soul’s Best Animated Feature award, director Pete Docter, co-director Kemp Powers, and producer Dayna Murray. Docter and Murray accepted the award together and held up an iPad with a pre-recorded speech from Powers. With this award, Pete Docter becomes the first director to win the category three times. He previously has taken home the Best Animated Feature award for Up and Inside Out. The award also made Powers the first Black debut filmmaker to win a Golden Globe in its 78-year-history. It was the 9th win for Pixar in this category since it was created in 2006.
“We are so grateful for this honor,” said Pete Docter. “Little did we know that making a film about jazz would teach us so much about life. We can’t always control what happens in the world, but like a good jazz musician we can try to turn that into something beautiful.”
“Being able to tell a universal tale that explored the meaning of life through the prism of a Black man’s experience was a special honor, and though the details are specific, I really do believe our story is universal,” Powers added.
Soul’s score is a collaboration between Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste. It includes two very different styles of music that represent the two very different worlds the story is moving through. It almost wasn’t considered a score as the jazz music by Jon Batiste could be considered source music and not a part of the score. If that were the case there wouldn’t be a long enough score to meet that threshold to be qualified at Oscars for Best Original Score. It requires the score to be at least 60% of the length of the movie. However, The Music Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences determined that both the dramatic music and the jazz music combined made up Soul’s score.
Disney and Pixar’s Soul was released on Christmas Day on Disney+. It tells the story of a band teacher named Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) who is pursuing his love of Jazz and seems just on the cusp of achieving his dream when everything changes for him. He then finds himself searching for a way to reunite his body and his soul.
The wins for Soul at the Golden Globes will undoubtedly bolster its chances at the Oscars. All but one of Pixar’s films that have won Best Animated Feature at the Golden Globes have gone on to win the category at the Oscars. The other nominees in the category were Dreamwork’s The Croods: A New Age, Onward from Pixar, Netflix’s Over the Moon, and Wolfwalkers from Apple TV+/GKIDS.
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