China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Animated talk
Director of Coco discusses film at cartoon festival
When award-winning American director Lee Unkrich addressed the 14th China International Cartoon & Animation Festival in Hangzhou on Friday, the hall was so full that some of the attendees were forced to sit on the floor. With his directorial hits Toy Story 3 and Coco, both winning best animated feature Oscars in 2010 and 2017, respectively, Unkrich’s speech was one of the hottest tickets at the annual festival.
With 1.2 billion yuan ($190 million) in box office earnings, Coco became the highest-grossing Pixar film in China, making four times more than second-placed Finding Dory.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 105-minute fantasy film about a Mexican boy’s adventure through a colorful Land of the Dead racked up a score of 9.1 points out of 10 on Douban, a popular Chinese film-rating platform.
The movie follows 12-yearold Miguel, who dreams of becoming a musician but is discouraged by his parents, who despise music since Miguel’s great-great grandfather abandoned the family in pursuit of his own tilt at stardom decades earlier. His desire to emulate his musical idol, and a magic guitar, thrusts Miguel into an adventurous romp accompanied only by his faithful pet, a Xolo dog named Dante.
Talking to China Daily, the 50-year-old filmmaker admits that he was surprised at the level of success Coco has achieved in the world’s second-largest movie market.
“Initially, we were worried that we wouldn’t even be allowed to release (the film) in China, due to the regulations,” he says. “But, it did get released and it did well, and we are happy about that.”
Touching on the reason for the film’s unexpected popularity, Unkrich believes the similarity between the Mexican and Chinese traditions about the deceased makes the movie relatable to local audiences.
“Part of my goal in making the film was to share the Mexican culture with people around the world, but I also wanted to tell a story which would be universal,” the veteran filmmaker notes. “The fact that the movie did so well in China shows that we were right.”
Since graduating from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts in 1990, Unkrich has been fascinated with Latino culture, especially the unlikely juxtapositions surrounding death, such as that of morbid, skeletal imagery set against bright colors and the festival feeling of celebration.
However, the original inspiration for the film came one year after the release of Toy
Story 3, during a family vacation to Disney World in Florida. While visiting the Mexico pavilion at the Epcot theme park in 2011, Unkrich spotted four papier-mache skeletons dressed like a mariachi band.
Two things immediately crossed his mind.
“I first thought, it would be really fun to see them being animated,” he says, adding that this is a world he hadn’t seen explored in film before.
“It can be a dangerous thing: telling a story about culture that is different from your own,” he says. “For Coco, I knew I had to really deeply understand the culture of Mexico.”
After deciding to set a fable against the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, Unkrich and his Pixar creation team did a lot of research, including visits to Mexico, where the team spent time with local families, watching documentaries and even inviting some Xolo dog breeders and their charges to the Pixar studio to study the symbolic animals.
Xolo canines are a hairless breed with a 3,500-year history in Mexico, where locals believe the dogs possess a supernatural power to ward off evil spirits.
It took hundreds of animators six years to create the vibrant world of Coco, during which time they had a major creative obstacle to overcome — skeletons are usually considered scary to most people.
“When we first announced that we would make a movie set against Day of the Dead, people thought Pixar was making a horror movie,” notes Unkrich. “Of course, we knew it wasn’t. We were going to make a comedy about family and love.
“In my mind, a skeleton is just another form of regular people.”
In order to make the skeleton characters appealing, Coco animators made them with eyeballs, lips and vivid facial expressions, even taking inspiration from some of Pixar’s most famous characters by digitally transforming them into skeletons to study the movements of their bones.
Speaking about the key to the enduring success of Pixar, the animation giant that now has 19 feature films to its name, and for which Unkrich has worked for the best part of two decades, he believes it’s the animators’ understanding about life that makes it work.
“Sometimes the story might be fantastical, and might not seem like being about us, but most of the time, underneath, it’s often about things that are important to us as people or a society,” he explains.
Recently embarking on a whirlwind tour of China — taking in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou — Unkrich says he has accumulated plenty of significant experiences of local life, which may inspire his future works.
“As we have traveled a lot, we discovered a lot of things and asked many questions, which has been similar to the journey that I undertook while making Coco,” he notes.
However, Chinese audiences won’t have to wait too long for a Pixar film rooted in Chinese culture, with Unkrich revealing that Domee Shi, a Chinese-Canadian, is about to become the first female director in the studio’s 32-year history when she releases her film
Bao (Steamed Bread). The animated short centers around a mother whose children have all left home and who gets another chance at parenting when the eponymous dish comes to life.
Bao is set for a summer release alongside Pixar’s much anticipated superhero sequel, Incredibles 2.
In my mind, a skeleton is just another form of regular people.” Lee Unkrich, director