Coco

The Pixar team is known for taking on weighty issues in their animated features, but the studio's latest film Coco is nothing less than a kid’s movie about death—and a brilliantly realized one at that. The story centers on a Mexican 12-year-old named Miguel who dreams of becoming a great musician like his idol, the late Ernesto de la Cruz. During the Day of the Dead celebration, after discovering a photograph of his grandmother, Coco, which shows his great-great-grandfather holding Ernesto's famous guitar, Miguel is inspired to enter the local talent show. However, his family's generations-old ban on music means he must procure and instrument in order to perform a song. So he decides to steal the legendary guitar from Ernesto's mausoleum.

Through a series of mishaps and the fact that during the Day of the Dead the barrier between the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead is porous, Miguel is able to interact with his deceased relatives and cross over to their magnificent world. However, Miguel’s theft of the guitar curses him to remain in the Land of the Dead unless he can receive a blessing from a family member by sunrise—and blessings from most in his family come with unacceptable conditions.

This gorgeous movie ranks as the most visually impressive work from Pixar yet. Both the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead are layered with richly imagined detail. The colorful, dimensional depictions of youth, old age, ghosts, music, and even inanimate objects transport the viewer inside the film—something all animated movies attempt but few actually achieve.

Most impressive is how delicately and successfully director Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3), screenwriters Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich, and the entire Pixar team thread the needle in the way they depict distinct Mexican traditions in an unabashed American family movie. The way these two cultures deal with death should make them incompatible. In America, the focus is on closure. After an appropriate time of mourning, Americans are encouraged to “move forward,” putting the past in the past and concentrating on the future. Indeed, Americans view the inability to let go of deceased loved-ones as a psychological condition requiring treatment, and nearly all American films about death and grief center on achieving some form of closure.

In the Mexican Catholic tradition, death doesn’t fully occur until those left behind have forgotten about those who have died. The of Day of the Dead is a holiday dedicated to remembering, celebrating, and communing with those who have passed on, keeping their spirit alive for as long as possible. Living in the past and viewing relationships with people who’ve died as still active is an essential component of the festival. Yet somehow, Coco manages to honour this tradition and system of belief while still delivering a more than palatable fantasy adventure fully in line with the grand Disney tradition of happily-every-after.

Likewise, this work of corporate American entertainment never feels exploitative of the culture it is essentially appropriating. Coco’s themes of reclaiming one’s heritage, capitalizing on traditions while still honouring them, and integrating the past with the present, should ring hollow, false, and embarrassingly ironic. Yet in the hands of this team of artists, all the visual details, narrative beats, musical interludes, and even the genuinely funny comical characters and jokes, are rendered with tangible respect, utterly free of self-conscious virtue signalling.

Though Coco is not a musical, a song called "Remember Me," by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (the team who gave us “Let It Go” from Frozen), plays a critical role in the narrative. "Remember Me” is required to satisfy a seemingly impossible set of criteria. It must appear throughout the picture without getting stale, it must feel equally creditable in styles ranging from mariachi to lullaby to pop-song, and it must serve as both a stirring nationalistic anthem and a deeply personal lament. Of all the Disney songs that have won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, this is one of the most deserving.

Despite the darkness and unavoidably scary depictions of ghosts and the afterlife, Coco is entirely appropriate for children. It’s the type of family entertainment that challenges rather than pacifies. And, like its Land of the Dead characters, this stunning accomplishment and triumphantly entertaining picture should live on forever.