Soul — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

The single densest cross-reference shot in Pixar's catalogue. The Hall of Everything — the room where souls sample every possible human enthusiasm — is furnished out of the studio's own digital asset library, and one shot contains the Pizza Planet truck, Willy's Butte from Cars, the Axiom from WALL·E, the ferris wheel from Toy Story 4, an Aztec building from Coco and the Spirit of Adventure, the airship from Up. The conceit justifies itself: a hall containing everything ought to contain everything the studio has ever made.

In the Hall of Everything, towards the right of frame, stands a signpost whose blades are almost all blank — except one, which carries A113. The staging is the joke: in a room representing the entirety of human possibility, the only thing anybody has bothered to name is a classroom at CalArts. It is Pixar's signature placed with a straight face inside a set about infinite choice.

The Pixar ball appears inside 22's quarters, just before she takes Joe through to the Hall of Everything, and it gets a lot of screen time. It is easy to miss anyway, because the Great Before renders everything in a simplified palette and the ball has lost its blue stripe — leaving the yellow and the red star. The studio's most-planted object, camouflaged not by being small or distant but by being repainted to obey the film's own art direction.

Around the 57:39 mark, while 22 is walking Joe's body through New York and Joe is stuck inside a therapy cat, the pair pass a travel agency. The poster in the window reads Visit Portorosso and invites you to Fly Luca Airlines — naming both the town and the title character of Luca, which would not arrive until June 2021. Pixar's next-film teases are usually a toy or a silhouette; this one is a fully rendered advertisement with the film's brand on it.

22's central joke is that she has been in the Great Before longer than anyone and has broken every mentor assigned to her — and the film names them. Her previous mentors include Marie Antoinette and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, among a run of historical figures who all failed to find her spark. It reframes 22 from a stubborn beginner into something closer to an undefeated champion, and it is delivered as a throwaway list.

Joe Gardner's performances are not invented hand positions. The animators worked from footage of Jon Batiste playing the film's jazz cues, matching finger placement to the real notes, so the keyboard work is musically honest rather than approximated. Pixar also brought in Herbie Hancock, Terri Lyne Carrington, Quincy Jones, Questlove and educator Johnnetta Cole as consultants — the deepest outside advisory bench the studio has assembled for a single film.

All the soul counsellors in the Great Before share a single name: Jerry. The film treats this as unremarkable, which is what makes it funny — abstract line-drawing entities administering the pre-birth of every human being, and none of them saw a reason to differentiate. The exception is Terry, the accountant who counts souls, and the film's entire second-act threat comes from the one bureaucrat who insisted on having a distinct identity.

The final image of the film is Terry turning to camera and saying, in effect, "Hey, movie's over. Go home." It is a fourth-wall break in the tradition of Ferris Bueller appearing after the credits of Ferris Bueller's Day Off to tell the audience to leave, and it is perfectly in character — Terry's whole function is to make sure the count comes out right, and you are the last thing still sitting where it shouldn't be.