At the recent D23 expo in Anaheim, California, this month, Disney announced and unveiled a whole host of upcoming visual treats.
From Game of Thrones‘ Kit Harington joining the cast of Marvel’s Eternals, to three new Phase Four TV shows, and the first look at Marvel Land’s Avengers Campus, it was an announcement-heavy expo.
But it’s not all Marvel, y’know? Disney are also behind a little studio called Pixar, perhaps you’ve heard of it? They’ve done a few decent films I guess – Toy Story, Up, Wall-E, The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., Coco, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, to name just a couple.
At the expo, Disney treated the audience to the first look at the upcoming Pixar film Soul. And while us mere mortals may have to wait a little while for the trailer to become public, we do know it’ll be starring Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Daveed Diggs, Questlove and Phylicia Rashad, as Variety points out.
The story follows Foxx’s character, a middle-school music teacher who must do some existential searching before he can achieve his dream of playing at New York jazz club, The Blue Note.
With a film which is set to heavily feature music as part of its plot, the choice of composer for the score has also become a talking point. While we’ve all come to associate Pixar films with idiosyncratic songwriters like Randy Newman (I doubt any of us will forget You’ve Got a Friend in Me or When She Loved Me any time soon), Pixar have made an unexpected but undoubtedly brilliant choice for Soul.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the brains behind Nine Inch Nails and the Oscar-winning composers behind scores for films such as The Social Network, Gone Girl, Bird Box and more, will be teaming up once again to write the score for Pixar’s Soul.
It’s a bold move for the studio considering Reznor and Ross’ usual, darker output, and perhaps a hint at the film’s tone compared to Pixar’s usual fare. But if anyone is going to provide a score for a jazz musician going on an existential journey through a cosmic realm, Nine Inch Nails are the guys to do it.
Soul will be released on June 19, 2020.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.