Coco (2017)
Aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his
family's ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to work out
the mystery.
Stars:
Despite his family's baffling generations-old ban on music, Miguel
dreams of becoming an accomplished musician like his idol, Ernesto de la
Cruz. Desperate to prove his talent, Miguel finds himself in the
stunning and colorful Land of the Dead following a mysterious chain of
events. Along the way, he meets charming trickster Hector, and together,
they set off on an extraordinary journey to unlock the real story
behind Miguel's family history.
Country:
USARelease Date:
22 November 2017 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Untitled Dia de los Muertos Project See more »Company Credits
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Technical Specs
Color:
ColorAspect Ratio:
2.35 : 1Did You Know?
Trivia
The filmmakers and animators traveled to Mexico five times to research about the culture, people, food, traditions, etc. to help define the story and characters of Coco (2017). Among their journeys, they visited Mexico City and Oaxaca. Director Lee Unkrich said of the experience, "I'd seen it portrayed in folk art. It was something about the juxtaposition of skeletons with bright, festive colors that captured my imagination. It has led me down a winding path of discovery. And the more I learn about Día de Muertos, the more it affects me deeply." See more »Quotes
[from trailer]Héctor: What are you doing?
Miguel: I'm walking like a skeleton.
Héctor: No, skeletons don't walk like that.
Miguel: That's how *you* walk.
Héctor: No, I don't.
See more »
Crazy Credits
The Disney logo has the Santa Cecilia cemetery in the background and has the Disney music played in Mexican mariachi style. See more »Soundtracks
"Coco" is the sprightly story of a young boy who wants to be a
musician and somehow finds himself communing with talking skeletons in
the land of the dead. Directed by Lee Unkrich ("Toy Story 3") and veteran Pixar animator Adrian Molina,
and drawing heavily on Mexican folklore and traditional designs, it has
catchy music, a complex but comprehensible plot, and bits of domestic
comedy and media satire. Most of the time the movie is a knockabout
slapstick comedy with a "Back to the Future"
feeling, staging grand action sequences and feeding audiences new plot
information every few minutes, but of course, being a Pixar film, "Coco"
is also building toward emotionally overwhelming moments, so stealthily
that you may be surprised to find yourself wiping away a tear even
though the studio has been using the sneak-attack playbook for decades.
The film's hero, twelve-year old Miguel Riviera (voice by Anthony Gonzalez),
lives in the small town of Santa Cecilia. He’s a goodhearted child who
loves to play guitar and idolizes the greatest popular singer-songwriter
of the 1920s and '30s, Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt),
who was killed when a huge church bell fell on his head. But Miguel has
to busk in secret because his family has banned its members from
performing music ever since Miguel's great-great-grandfather left,
abandoning his loved ones to selfishly pursue his dreams of stardom. At
least that’s the official story passed down through the generations;
it’ll be challenged as the film unfolds, not through a traditional
detective story (although there’s a mystery element to “Coco”) but
through an “Alice in Wonderland” journey to the Land of the Dead, which the hero accesses through the tomb of his ancestors.
Family
and legacy as expressed through storytelling and song: this is the
deeper preoccupation of “Coco.” One of the most fascinating things about
the movie is the way it builds its plot around members of Miguel’s
family, living and dead, as they battle to determine the official
narrative of Miguel’s great-great grandfather and what his disappearance
from the narrative meant for the extended clan. The title character is
the hero’s great-grandmother (Renee Victor), who was traumatized by her
dad’s disappearance. In her old age, she has become a nearly silent
presence, sitting in the corner and staring blankly ahead, as if
hypnotized by a sweet, old film perpetually unreeling in her mind.
The
machinations that get Miguel to the other side are too complicated to
explain in a review, though they’re comprehensible as you watch the
movie. Suffice to say that Miguel gets there, teams up with a melancholy
goofball named Hector (Gael Garcia
Bernal), and has to pose as one of the dead with the aid of skeletal
facepaint, but that (like Marty McFly returning to the 1950s to make
sure his mom ends up with his dad in “Future”) the longer Miguel stays
on the other side, the more likely he is to end up actually dead.
I’m reluctant to describe the film’s plot in too much detail
because, even though every twist seems obvious in retrospect, Molina and
Matthew Aldrich’s
script frames each one so that seems delightful and inevitable. Many of
them are conveyed through a stolen family photograph that Miguel brings
with him to the Land of the Dead. The deployment of the photo is a
great example of how to tell a story through pictures, or more
accurately, with a picture. Somebody’s face has been
torn out; there’s a guitar that proves to be important later, and there
are other ways in which visual information has been withheld from Miguel
(and us) so that it can be revealed or restored when the time is right,
completing and correcting an incomplete or distorted picture, and
"picture.”
What’s freshest, though, is the tone and outlook of
the film. “Coco” opened in Mexico a month before it opened in the USA
and is already the highest grossing film of all time there. It assumes a
non-American point-of-view on spirituality and culture—not in a
touristy or “thought experiment” sort of way, but as if it were merely
the latest product of an alternate universe Pixar Mexicano that has
existed for just as long as the other one. The film’s stable of voice
actors reads like a Who’s Who of Latin-American talent: the ensemble
includes Edward James Olmos, Alfonso Arau, Ana Ofelia Murguia, Alanna Ubach and, in a small role, to my surprise and astonishment, playwright Octavio Solis,
who was one of my teachers in high school back in Dallas. Michael
Giacchino's score is unsurprisingly excellent, as are the original
songs—in particular, the future Oscar winner "Remember Me," the greatest tear-eruption mechanism to accompany a Pixar release since the "Toy Story 2" centerpiece "When She Loved Me."
Like
most Pixar productions, this one is filled with homages to film history
in general and animation history in particular. I was especially fond
of the references to the dancing skeletons that seemed to pop up
constantly in cartoon shorts from the 1930s. There’s a touch of Japanese
master Hayao Miyazaki
in the film’s matter-of-fact depiction of the dead interacting with the
living, as well as its portrayal of certain creatures, such as a goofy,
goggle-eyed dog named Dante (modeled on Xoloitzcuintli, the national
dog of Mexico) and a gigantic flying dragon-type beast with the
personality of a plump old housecat.
Also notable are the film's widescreen compositions, which put lots
of characters in the same frame and shoot them from the waist up or from
head-to-toe, in the manner of old musicals, or Hollywood comedies from
the eighties like "9 to 5" or "Tootsie."
The direction lets you appreciate how the characters interact with each
other and with their environments and lets you decide what to look at.
At first this approach seems counter-intuitive for a movie filled with
fantastic creatures, structures and situations, but it ends up being
effective for that very reason: it makes you feel as though you're
seeing a record of things that are actually happening, and it makes
"Coco" feel gentle and unassuming even though it's a big, brash, loud
film.
I had some minor quibbles about “Coco” while I was watching it, but I can’t remember what they were. This film is a classic.
FINAL RATING: 9/10 FOR THE GENRE AND 9/10 OVERALL. Overwhelming.
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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