THAT’S THE SPIRIT!
Day of the Dead-themed flick proves Pixar’s creativity is alive & well
COCO Never a skull moment. Running time: 109 minutes. Rated PG (thematic elements). Now playing.
T HE Pixar you know and love is back.
After a string of lazy franchise retreads, such as “Cars 3” and “Finding Dory,” and overly clever concepts like “Inside Out,” the ingenious animation studio has come blazing into the holiday season with “Coco,” one of its sweetest and most soul-satisfying movies ever.
“Coco” is set in a tiny Mexican town on Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, when people pay tribute to their long-gone loved ones. Little Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), however, isn’t really feeling his family this year. Instead, he’s addicted to the guitar, strumming for hours in the attic and idolizing a ’50s icon named Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt).
But, like Kevin Bacon with an instrument, poor Miguel’s folks have forbidden him from pursuing music. Decades earlier, his guitarist great-greatgrandfather abandoned the clan, including great-grandma Coco, who now suffers from dementia.
Furious, our guitar hero flies the coop, magically winding up in the Land of the Dead in search of his great-greatgrandpa with the hope that he’ll bless Miguel’s rock-star ambitions from beyond the grave. The adventure is moving, escapist and — bonus! — there’s a puppy.
The filmmakers, including director Lee Unkrich, celebrate Mexican culture with great aesthetic panache.
The role of the marigold is important in Día de los Muertos. The vibrant orange flowers are placed on altars in homes to honor people who’ve passed on. In “Coco,” the bridge to the Land of the Dead — easily Pixar’s most beautiful landscape — is covered in the bright petals that drizzle down like rain. The spectacle brings to mind the fantastic environments of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away.”
So does the land itself, an enormous metropolis made to look like a grand old train station. It’s inhabited by cuddly skeletons, including Miguel’s ancestors who aid him on his journey. However, don’t worry, parents. These bundles of bones aren’t particularly freaky for kids, like Jack from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” might be. Leave it to Pixar to make skulls super lovable. And to put them in front of microphones. “Coco” is packed with terrific original tunes such as “Remember Me” (by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez of “Frozen”) and “Proud Corazón” (cowritten by Adrian Molina, the film’s co-director). But it’s not your average musical, in which characters wail their wants and feelings. That’s a refreshing change. Not adhering to the traditional formula — an “Under the Sea” here, a “Let It Go” there — allows the “Coco” writers to dive deep into authentic Latin music, like ranchera and corrido. Many of the numbers are sung entirely in Spanish or Spanglish. Yet more enlivening are the movie’s unusually high stakes — surely Pixar’s highest since the sublime “Up.” That’s because the main character here isn’t a bug, or a rat or a blob called Sadness — he’s a little boy with big dreams and even bigger emotions. Gonzalez, the 12-year-old star who gives voice to Miguel, is as sharp an actor as he is a singer. In the movie’s final two minutes, he reminds us that the true strength of Pixar’s films isn’t smarty-pants setups and sophisticated adult inside jokes, but honest heart and humanity.