NO DEAD GIVEAWAYS IN COCO
Visually stunning musical dreamscape explores big ideas, keeps adults guessing
Pixar’s newest computeranimated film is set in both the real world of Mexico and in the afterlife, after 12-year-old Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) accidentally crosses over without actually expiring, during the holiday of Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead. That’s right: The dead have constructed a bridge between metaphysical realms, and Mexico is paying for it.
Purgatorial politics aside, the story is actually a sweet meditation on family and destiny, and the ways in which one can trump the other. Miguel, you see, wants to be a musician. He practises the guitar regularly in secret, and he’s quite good. But the family has been avowedly atonal ever since his great-great-grandfather abandoned them to pursue a similar career. Now they only make shoes, and probably not dancing shoes.
Miguel’s adventure begins when he tries to steal the guitar of his long-deceased idol, Ernesto de la Cruz, from the man’s mausoleum. (It’s even possible, based on the design of the guitar, that de la Cruz is Miguel’s long-lost ancestor.) But the grave-robbery teleports Miguel to the other side, where his departed relatives refuse to help return him home unless he gives up on his musical dreams. Clearly, the ghost of de la Cruz, voiced by Benjamin Bratt, is his only hope.
Under the co-direction of Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 2 and 3) and Adrian Molina, Coco is a fast-paced adventure story with enough plot twists to surprise even the parents of its target
audience. It also delves, sombrely and beautifully, into the notion of a kind of double-death — once when you depart this plane, and again when the last living memory of your existence also dies. But metaphysics isn’t in the foreground. This is about Miguel’s quest for musical approval, as aided by good-hearted ne’er-dowell Hector (Gael García Bernal) and by a stray dog, appropriately named Dante.
The visuals are wonderful to behold. The land of the dead is not only brilliantly colourful, but boasts its own infrastructure, including nightclubs, transit, passport bureaucracy and even cinemas. I can only assume it plays a weird version of Swiss Army Man starring a living Daniel Radcliffe, and a Sixth Sense in which the protagonist is alive the whole time and doesn’t know it.
Coco is preceded by Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, a 21-minute animated short in which the snowman from 2013’s Frozen investigates the spirit of Christmas on behalf of his patrons, Anna and Elsa. It features four new songs and endless comic misadventures, and has been cleverly designed to help sate “Frozies” who are already counting down the days until the release of Frozen 2 on Nov. 27, 2018.
Mexican audiences rebelled against the Olaf short and theatre owners pulled it from distribution shortly after Coco had its release on the Día de Muertos weekend in October.
I’m not a huge fan of it, but it’s a decent enough cinematic appetizer.
Besides, cold never bothered me anyway.