Delightful Coco bursts with joy Coco (PG, 105 mins) Directed by Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina
Coco is the 19th film from Pixar Studios. I’d say it is also one of its very best.
Even a bad day at Pixar generally yields a better animated movie than most studios will ever make in their wildest dreams (we’re just going to pretend Cars 2 never happened, for the sake of this argument). And at its best, Pixar has turned out a handful of films that aren’t just good, but legitimately great. Coco is right up in the top tier.
Miguel lives in a small town in rural Mexico.
He wants nothing more than to be a great mariachi, and he has the homemade guitar and the selftaught chops to achieve it. The only problem is, because of the sins of a musical but errant greatgrandfather, music is banned in Miguel’s family home.
So he practises and plays in secret, in an attic he has made into a shrine for Ernesto de la Cruz; the greatest mariachi of them all.
Via a couple of twists too daft to really recount, Miguel travels to La Tierra de Los Muertos (The Land of the Dead), where he must team up with various departed members of his family to put right an old feud and then make it home before the sun rises on Dia de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead).
It’s a nice yarn, it hangs together well enough, has at least one twist I didn’t see coming and is populated by a great cast of characters. Which is pretty much the baseline for any Pixar production.
It seems to me that while we rightly praise Pixar for the beauty of its animation and design, we sometimes neglect to mention just how startlingly well written its films usually are.
Coco is lifted into the pantheon, I think, by the care and attention that has been paid to the film’s setting.
Coco, even more so than any other Pixar film I can think of, is stuffed to bursting with sound, colour and life. Every frame of this film is a riot of detail and movement.
Pixar recruited a mostly Latin American cast to voice the film, and then also hired legendary Mexican cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz as a consultant.
Alcaraz once drew Mickey Mouse as a racist North American border cop and he was a leader of the backlash at Disney’s (which distributes Coco) misbegotten attempt to trademark the expression Dia de los Muertos.
Having him inside the tent was a coup and a mark of some much needed humility in the face of the perception that Coco was set to represent yet another North American film company coming over the border just to rip off the sights and sounds of Mexico without ever bothering to respect the reality of the place.
Co-directors Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina have both talked at length about the need to finally ‘‘get it right’’.
In that sense, the comparisons to Jorge R. Gutierrez’s 2014 film The Book of Life are probably valid.
But Coco is in no way a rip-off of the earlier film. Coco is lush, vibrant, teeming with life and altogether delightful. And because of the authenticity and respect the film-makers have shown to their story and its people, this film just bursts with joy. Bravo.
– Graeme Tuckett