Don’t confuse my rating for powerful praise. A Pixar movie about the Dia De Los Muertos directed by the Toy Story 3 director was gonna be sparkly and emotional, and Coco certainly delivers on both of those accounts. I was hoping for something transcendent, but alas, Kubo and the Two Strings remains the best story aimed toward kids about honoring your family and the dead.
Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) is the newest heir to a shoemaking family in Mexico. But Miguel has a dream: he wants to become a famous musician, like one of his ancestors Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal). His family despises this idea, since Hector has shamed the family with his actions; however, Miguel remains undeterred, and through a series of events, finds himself in the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead. At first Miguel loves this; he gets to meet his relatives like Hector’s wife Abuelita (Renee Victor), however, he soon finds out he’s in grave danger, and seeks help from his family and Ernesto (Benjamin Bratt), a soon to be forgotten man hoping to get a chance to cross over one last time.
Coco feels a lot like Pixar on autopilot. What would autopilot for Pixar look like you ask? Good question. It means sacrificing story beats for more focus on cool songs and cool imagery. The land of the dead in Coco is like a super colorful version of any city. There’s immigration services, town squares, and giant concert venues. What makes it cool is these buildings rise high into the sky, and are jam packed with colors of all types. The pets are the highlight; the creatures resemble stuff in the real world, but a cat for example would be a gigantic rainbow griffin soaring majestically through the air. The song writers have a difficult task here: you want to honor the legacy of Mexican musicality but have to appeal to people in China, or Dubai. As such, the Frozen song team uses a mariachi base to write pretty poppy stuff. None of the songs come close to Let It Go, but Remember Me will tug at your heart strings, and Un Poco Loco is really fun and lively. My gut says the slower the song the better chance of sticking, but who knows with kids hits? I do know the music and visuals do their job well.
And their job is covering for some deficiencies in the script. I’m sorry Pixar, but it’s not enough that you can just execute really well a story that I could predict beat for beat. You’re MUCH better than that. The first hour of Coco is kind of a drag; until the real major players sort themselves out, the movie feels the need to overexplain why Dia De Los Muertos is important, when it could just be a line or two of dialogue. Or better, have the grandma character explain who some of Miguel’s ancestors are, since it’s clear we are going to meet them in the land of the dead. The movie doesn’t do any of this, making us really not care about Miguel’s family except the weird reason the family doesn’t like music, hurting the movie’s themes about the importance of family and our ancestors. Thankfully, with the characters they do care about, the directors of Coco really start to emotionally deliver punches once the big reveals happen. There’s one scene at the end that you will have a hard time not having tears for. Sticking the landing certainly helps, but I still am a little upset at how the lackluster beginning soured me on this movie a bit.
At this movie with my friends, I looked around, and all I could see were Hispanic parents with their kids. Coco will end up a giant success for simply for that reason. It’s always great when a culture underrepresented in movies or cinema gets their due, especially in a kids movie. So to all those little Hispanic kids who imagined themselves Elsa or Officer Hopps or Hiro, there’s now someone like Miguel or your own Grandma Coco that you can watch and enjoy with your family; good for you Disney, for trying to connect with your entire audience.