A short allegory of mine called "Elephants of Liberty". Jesse had always been the most brilliant mind in the village. By the age of 7 he invented a new way of measuring time so classes at school lasted shorter and playing time lasted longer. At 10, he came up with the idea of water showers dramatically improving the overall health in the caves. By the age of 20, he devised his genius Omninet connecting people from dozens of villages nearby. Thanks to Omninet, cave people and mountain people and river people were happier: they spoke more and quarreled less. But one day, when Jesse brought his soft-line across the mountains he found out another brilliant man had been doing the same on the other side. He was an old man named Kevin, inventor of a grid tying together towns from mountains to sea. Jesse and Kevin merged Omninet and HoliArch and people from the whole country met the peak of their civilization and found buyers, sellers, friends, lovers, or acolytes from everywhere. One day, Jesse and Kevin gathered together in a room to celebrate their accomplishment and discussed how their invention could bring more prosperity and liberty to people. So talented were those two minds that they produced a list of updates in an hour. For financing further development, they'd start charging people for the use of the system with a food or personal service tax. They would choose rulers of the people inspired by their genius and the cool principles of the system. They would expel from the system anyone who hurted it or spoke bad of it because this was bi-unanimously deemed as irrational. They would establish a mental institution to help any irrational individuals find their balance in a perfectly balanced society. And finally, they would forbid any expansion of the system towards any other system ideas to prevent the almost certain detriment to its perfection that would come from it. So no more soft-lines were stretched. So talented were these two young and old men.

Last week I watched "Soul" from Pixar. Everything this animation studio makes is a masterpiece or near-masterpiece. Their last film felt to me like a near-masterpiece with a similar tone to the masterpiece "Coco". "Soul" tells the story of a middle school music teacher, named Joe Gardner, who falls down a sewer hole in New York hours before his first big opportunity to perform at a jazz club. After the accident, he will find himself in a metaphysical realm put to the test of reuniting his body and soul. There's a lot of artistic beauty and finnese in this fantasy movie, many funny lines along the script as well as a great deal of wisdom, philosophical strokes and a deep compassion for the human experience. These are not a surprise anymore: 15 years ago I fought people defending that Pixar works were the best distillate of intelligence and meaningful art pieces on theaters. Today I can rest placidly because everybody knows this and expect the highest of every Pixar film. I've always thought one of the greatest cinema geniuses off all time and the one I admire the most, Charles Chaplin, if he still lived and was able to go to the movies, he wouldn't go so often, and when he did he would choose Pixar. After all, Pixar draws a lot from Chaplin.