Saw it yesterday and its been bothering me because I feel like I thought I liked it but am starting to almost sour a little bit on it.

I mean, it's a very beautiful, well animated film with a great score, but there's a few things that just sit wrong with me.

  • Pretty sure that the character voiced by a white woman spends more time in the black man's body than the actual black man. Wtf is it with Tina Fey and blackface?

  • On top of that it seemed that part of the whole narrative was that this white woman voiced character (22) lived the black man's life better than he did.

  • The whole structure of it felt... weird. It felt like the movie just kinda strolled along for about 80%, and then all of a sudden the climax just shows up, the characters learn their lessons ("enjoy life", I think? It seemed a bit vague tbh) and the movie just... ends. Maybe some are fine with the ending, but I felt it didn't sufficiently answer any questions and left a few too many dangling plot threads to feel satisfying.

Idk maybe I'm just dumb or reading too much into a kids movie but it felt like there was the potential for a better movie there.

  • warped_fungus [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    no offense but it seems like you're just not giving it the suspension of belief it asks for in order to enjoy it. I am 100% in favor of criticizing movies that have racial bias, but voice acting is not the same as on-screen representation, and the lack of representation is a fault of pixar, not the movie itself. I didn't even recognize it as Fey until the credits. Specifically, the lost soul has literally never lived in a body so therefore has never been any kind of race. it outright says it puts on a white middle age woman voice to annoy people. Joe Gartner was being general, he didn't literally mean that the lost soul was better at his whole life - the lost soul was just better at conversation, one of gartner's worst skills, so she earns proportionally more respect from him for it. it wasnt better than him as his life, as a jazz musician. also, if joe gartner was in his body most of the time, there wouldnt be much of a conflict.