Coco: Gracias, Pixar

A couple years ago, I saw this meme floating around the Internet that broke down every Pixar movie as “What if _____ had feelings?” What if toys had feelings? What if fish had feelings? What if robots had feelings? What if FEELINGS had feelings? It’s a funny observation, but it’s a testament to how Pixar have managed to make an art form (or rather a science) out of emotional investment. In that sense, it would be easy to write off their latest venture, Coco, as “What if dead people had feelings?”, but to do so would be to ignore Pixar’s other great strength: intrinsically tying deep meaning to lighthearted subject matter. Toy Story isn’t just about a cowboy feuding with a spaceman, it’s about the fear of obsolescence. Monsters Inc isn’t just about the monsters that live in our closet, it’s about the dangers of xenophobia and using fear to exploit that which we don’t understand. Inside Out isn’t just about the inner emotional workings of a young girl, it’s about maturing emotionally and learning how to find balance and solace in emotions that are deemed negative. And in the case of Coco, it’s not just a movie about the Mexican Day of the Dead, it’s about the family, power of memories and the dangers of hero worship.

Our story follows Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), a boy who dreams of becoming a musician like his idol Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), despite his family’s generations-long ban on music. Miguel’s great-great grandfather (who he believes to be Ernesto) was a musician who abandoned his family to pursue his career, hence their resentment toward him. Despite their protests, Miguel practices in secret and plans on performing to a group of people on Dia de Muertos. When his grandmother finds and destroys his guitar, he sneaks into Ernesto’s tomb and steals his, putting a curse on his family and bringing him to the Land of the Dead. The only way to undo it is to get an ancestor’s blessing to go back make things right, but after he refuses to accept their condition to never play music again, he sets off to find Ernesto and get his blessing instead. Along the way he runs into a vagabond named Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal) who says he can help him on the condition he take a picture of himself back to the Land of the Living so that he doesn’t become forgotten and fade away.

Needless to say, this movie is gorgeous. From the animation to the music to the character design, it looks fantastic. The Land of the Dead especially is as much of a character as anyone else, living or dead. From the exquisite marigold bridge that connects the two worlds, to the extravagant piñata colored spirit creatures (alebrijes) that roam the streets to the saturated lantern lit picados that seem to stretch on forever, it’s a place that feels alive and lived in. Ironic considering all its inhabitants are dead. The macabre premise may seem inspired by a childlike fascination with the morbid, but here we see a rather interesting interpretation of the Afterlife. There are still rich and poor, the deceased have to deal with border patrol before they can visit their living family, and we learn that just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re immortal. The dead are sustained by the memories of the living, and those who are forgotten are whisked away to an unknown fate. This an especially frightening worry for Hector, who doesn’t seem much liked in death as he was in life.

What also can’t be ignored is just how much care and respect that the movie has for Mexican culture and the Day of the Dead festival in particular. I can’t speak for anyone since I’m about as Mexican as a Chipotle burrito, but all accounts from Mexican viewers I’ve read have praised it for its accuracy and attention to detail. There are nods differences between Mexican regions to cameos from its most famous celebrities (the only one I immediately recognized was Freida Kahlo, who has some of the movie’s weirdest moments). It’s inevitably going to be compared to The Book of Life, which has its flaws despite being technically more “authentic”, but to simplify it as a culturally appropriated version of it (which in and of itself is nonsense since both the head writer and the entire cast are Mexican) completely misses the point of both the story and its creation.

But this is Pixar, a studio who’s known and lauded for spending the first two years of its five-year filmmaking process honing and fine-tuning the story until it’s a nuclear weapon of feels. It’s gotten to the point where we can predict certain things from them (their pre-occupation with memory and anxieties of parenthood are not absent), but even when it’s keeping several balls in the air, the script is still airtight. That plot summary may seem like a condensed version of the tale, when it’s really just a recap of the first act. This is one of the busiest and strictly organized Pixar films to date, and while it manages multiple plot threads, including the surprise reveal of a really effective villain, it never loses sight of the real focus. And of course, the last 20 minutes are an absolute gut-punch, with one particular scene involving two characters sharing a song guaranteed to join Jessie’s origin in Toy Story 2, the incinerator in Toy Story 3 and the first ten minutes of Up as one of Pixar’s most emotionally devastating moments.

Bottom line, Coco is another notch in the Pixar belt. It’s culturally respectful, and takes a fresh angle on their worn themes of mortality, memory, seeing traces of ourselves in the past, and how our anxieties about death reflect our anxieties of life. This has a nice cozy spot in my year-end list. Some may take umbrage with Pixar’ constant need to yank at our heartstrings, but I don’t mind since they do such a damn good job at it.

9/10