A cartoon dance with the dead that will melt your heart
DON’T listen to the self-righteous shrieks of ‘cultural appropriation’ being aimed at Disney, and Pixar, who have collaborated to make this utterly beguiling animation inspired by Mexico’s annual Day Of The Dead festival. It is wonderful in every way.
A boy called Miguel (voiced by newcomer Anthony Gonzalez) has the misfortune to grow up in the only family in Mexico that hates music.
There is a reason; Miguel’s great- great- grandmother was abandoned as a young mother by her husband, who felt his destiny was to become a musician.
Her daughter Coco is now a very old woman who has passed down the decree that music must be forbidden. Instead, Miguel’s family has established a shoemaking business, which the boy is expected to join.
But Miguel, while respectful towards his elders, secretly yearns to sing and play the guitar.
Like everyone else in his town, he worships the memory of the late, great troubadour ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), and is duly thrilled
to find there is a family connection which perhaps you can guess. The excitement really begins when Miguel is transported to the Land of the Dead, where the deceased live on only for as long as they remain in the memories of the living.
He needs to find Ernesto, and recruits the help of a roguish fellow called Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal), who is not beyond disguising himself as Frida Kahlo, the famous (and very much dead) Mexican artist, to inveigle himself into places he’s not wanted.
Like all the best Pixar films, Coco is exuberantly funny, at times genuinely poignant and quite stunningly animated, with terrific songs.
Its standout number is Remember Me, written by Robert and Kristen Anderson- Lopez, the talented husband-and-wife team behind the songs in Disney’s 2013 hit Frozen. The director is Lee Unkrich, whose credits include 2010’s Toy Story 3. That won an Academy Award and Coco richly deserves one too, in part for the extraordinary skill with which it overcomes the problem of portraying dead people.
The skeletons in the Land of the Dead are exquisitely, often hilariously rendered.
Going all the way back to Casper The Friendly Ghost and beyond, animators have had to tackle this difficulty. But it’s never been done with such delicious exuberance as it is here.
You might think twice about taking impressionable young children, but otherwise, this is an unmissable treat for the whole family.