Their generic blue-blob appearance and the voice explanation is meant to make us suspend our racial disbelief, and identify Fey’s voice not as that of a white woman, but as a parlor trick. The explanation allows the filmmakers to sketch 22’s personality without assigning the character a racial identity. But 22 chose Fey’s vocal identity because others find it annoying. When Black New Yorker Joe Gardner dies early in Soul, and winds up in a pre-life world called the Great Before, where he’s tasked with mentoring an unborn soul numbered 22, he takes exception to their voice: “Why do you sound like a middle-aged white woman?” 22, voiced by Tina Fey, proves they can sound like any race or gender, including perfectly mimicking Joe. While it’s reductive to say someone “sounds white,” there is a dominant syntax attached to whiteness that influences its vocal quality. Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) finds telemarketing riches once he adopts a white voice (dubbed in by David Cross), while Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) pitches his voice to higher nasal intonations over the phone to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. Sorry to Bother You and BlacKkKlansman both play on the idea of Black men using white-sounding voices, to comedic effect. They’ve unwittingly crafted what’s known as a “passing narrative,” a story that betrays its Black protagonist in favor of the white good.Īs humans, we’re prone to racializing people based on how they sound. In grafting a Black lead character onto an initially non-Black story, directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers and their co-writer Mike Jones portray the comforts of Black life, yet miss its intricacies. But when the nebulous character 22 enters the fray, the animated jazz odyssey becomes a wholly different tale. Soul opens as a story about finding individual purpose in life. It’s a film where a supposedly raceless character takes over a Black body, causing the Black character to minimize his own dreams for a symbiotic good. It’s a film where the Black character is either a blue blob or a cat for much of the action, but is rarely in his own Black body. Soul is Pixar’s first film with a Black protagonist, but the story never accepts the narrative complexities of Blackness.
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