WARNING: The following article contains discussion of suicide.
Pixar's Soul was one of the most popular movies of 2020, watched by millions on Disney+ and winning the Academy Awards for Best Animated Film and Best Original Score. Nine Days, an indie film about the same concept of what happens to souls before birth, also won awards during its film festival run, but hardly anyone even knows about the Sony Pictures Classics release. In its first weekend of wider release, Nine Days has only made $232,509 in 443 theaters -- for comparison, that's a quarter of what Pig opened to in only around a hundred more theaters, and less money than the 11th weekend of the already-streaming A Quiet Place Part II.
As an R-rated film for adults with a slower pace and less feel-good atmosphere, Nine Days obviously couldn't appeal to as wide an audience as the all-ages Soul, but mature viewers who were moved by Pete Docter's latest Oscar winner should absolutely check out Edson Oda's Nine Days. By being able to address life's darker aspects more directly, its vision of the "before-life" proves to be even more powerful than Pixar's, and it's a superior film to Soul in other ways as well.
Soul visualizes "The Great Before" as another fantasy bureaucracy in the now-standard Pixar mold. Personality qualities are assigned to souls seemingly at random who go through seminars from famous mentors in hopes of finding the "spark" that will send them to Earth. The cleverest aspect of the film's supernatural worldbuilding is the reveal that, contrary to Joe's conviction that the "spark" has to be a specific passion or goal, it turns out it's simply any sort of desire to live, something which forces Joe to reconsider his achievement-oriented worldview.
The pre-life existence shown in Nine Days operates on a much more personalized scale, closer to the small-scale "neighborhoods" in The Good Place. In a house in a desert, a man named Will and his assistant Kyo place a group of souls through a nine-day series of tests to determine which one of them will be chosen to live. These souls seem to arrive with their personalities already fully formed, which may be arbitrary but at least makes said arbitrariness less distracting than the half-formed nature of Soul's badge system. In contrast to the relaxed school atmosphere of how Soul prepares souls for life, Nine Days' challenges are more competitive, confrontational and psychologically challenging, making for greater drama.
Thematically, Nine Days picks up questions that Soul, by its nature as a PG-rated family film, couldn't address: if a desire to live is ultimately what "sparks" a soul into existence, what does it mean when a living person loses their "spark"? The issues of depression and suicide hang over everything in Nine Days -- Will is himself a suicide victim, and his previous soul selection ended up in the same circumstances. His selection criteria are about readiness as much as anything else -- which souls have the strength to make it through a war or a concentration camp? The movie suggests that if you're alive at all, you can make it through anything and that lost sparks can be rekindled, while also being completely sympathetic to those for whom the struggle feels like too much.
Soul received praise for being Pixar's first film about a Black man, but also criticism for placing that Black man into other bodies for the majority of its runtime, first as a disembodied soul, then as a cat while 22, a technically aracial soul voiced by white woman Tina Fey, commandeered his original body. Nine Days lets its Black stars, Winston Duke as Will and Zazie Beetz as Emma, stay in their own bodies for the duration of the film. Those who care about diversity in filmmaking will definitely find a lot to appreciate about Nine Days, which is written and directed by first-time Japanese-Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda.
For all of Soul's positive qualities, particularly its portrayal of Joe's mid-life crisis in the human world, its greater metaphysical storyline just doesn't dig as deeply as Nine Days does. Whether you're able to see it in the theater safely or if you'd prefer to wait to watch it when it comes to VOD, Nine Days deserves much more publicity than it's received and stands as one of the best films of 2021 so far.
Nine Days is now playing in theaters.
For more information on the warning signs and prevention of suicide, click here. If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or considering suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside the U.S., click here for a list of international hotlines.
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