WesternAnimation One of Pixar's strongest emotional films...with some sacrifices of representation.
I reviewed The Book of Life negatively, hoping Coco would be the better Mexican afterlife film. It definitely was.
Miguel Rivera's family has sworn off music after his great-grandfather abandoned his great-grandmother in the pursuit of a musical career. His legacy has been erased as the Riveras reinvented themselves as prosperous shoemakers, but Miguel loves music. He idolizes the late musician Ernesto de la Cruz, and believes he is the great-grandfather who left, and decides to steal his guitar from his tomb to perform after his homemade guitar has been smashed.
As it's the Day of the Dead, this act sends him to the afterlife, where the dead Riveras meet him and he tries to meet de la Cruz in the afterlife.
This movie is beautiful. The art design is colorful and engaging. It's also Pixar's first musical, though the (fantastic) songs are all diegetic and framed as performances. I also love the characters. Mamá Imelda, the bitter great-grandmother met in the afterlife, is so compelling and well-developed over the course of the film, and Hèctor, a tattered forgotten soul desperate to cross back into the real world, is also a really fun character. The story gets absolutely gut-wrenching and satisfyingly resolved through twists and turns and is one of the most powerful from the studio. The scene featuring "La Llorona" is also a brilliantly staged musical number based on everything that leads up to it.
There are aspects to be critical of. It's definitely weird that the Mexican cultural movie not headed by Mexicans focuses on bureaucratized border control as a major facet of the fantasy world (the bridge to the living world only opens to souls who are remembered by their family and have a photo out on the ofrenda), and this clearly unfair system is not broadly challenged by the story. I've also heard complaints about the rules of the holiday in the film being invented to make a story happen and that they conflict with the actual Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead, which goes out of its way to honor the forgotten so they can cross over. In other words, the film may have constructed a system of oppression that wasn't part of the holiday and ties harmfully into the culture at hand. However, I think the film can still be enjoyed while acknowledging these problematic choices, and Mexico loves it, so...? I certainly think it has more respect for the audience and much more emotional, character, and narrative nuance than The Book of Life.
At closer look, this film may be a clumsy cultural representation, but I still find it to be a powerful story with excellent characters, plot, and music. What that adds up to is yours to say.
WesternAnimation Coco succeeded where Up fell flat.
As a lifelong watcher of Pixar films, I've gotten to see how they've grown, decayed, and transformed. And Coco has proved that they're able to make up for past mistakes.
While I'm not actively comparing two films, Coco does share many similarities to Up, namely an ambitious protagonist, a journey to a new world, and a surprise villain who serves as a Shadow Archetype of the hero. The biggest difference is the complete lack of monochrome storytelling in Coco and all the important characters being developed in somewhat equal measure.
I could just be saying this because I went into the film knowing only that it was a Pixar film and nothing else, (and highly encourage others to do so) but Coco shows that you can remake a less-than-optimal film if you know what you did wrong and correct for it. Up was by no means a horrible film; it just didn't have the kind of complexity that Pixar is known for.
WesternAnimation A Very Shaky Start, But Builds Up a Whole Lot of Steam
So, full disclosure. I'm not hispanic, I've never celebrated Dia de los Muertos even in the high school Spanish class that familiarized me with the holiday, and I'm not a musician in any capacity. But I do love folk music, friendly skeletons, and psychedelic colors, and this movie has lots of those.
This isn't a perfect movie, and a lot of the reasons why involve the first act. After a pretty intro using paper cut-outs to tell the story of how a shoemaking family came to hate music, we get shoved into a very familiar story of a kid who wants to follow his artistic dreams, but whose family are stubbornly opposed to his fantasies of chasing stardom through music. There's a few good comedy beats in there to make it go down more smoothly, but I don't think the movie really starts to fire on all cylinders until his attempt at stealing from the dead on a bad night to do so lands him in Xibalba.
From there, the story really starts to pick up, and even goes in a couple unexpected directions. My only major complaints about this section of the film are the conspicuous absence of the Catholic elements so central to the modern holiday, and the fact that a number of the dead family members, despite having designs that absolutely drip with personality, don't really get enough screentime.
I recognize that morals about family being important and following one's dreams are dime-a-dozen in kids' and family pictures, but, without wanting to spoil, I think this film did manage to handle both in an atypically-mature, interesting way that I haven't really seen enough. And the colorful, skeleton-filled land of the dead is gorgeous and lively without ever fully succumbing to How To Tame Your Dragon-itis.
The central protagonist kind of annoyed me at the start, but I grew to like him as the story went on, and the rest of the cast was wonderful. Special mention goes to the fast-talking huckster character you think you've seen in a million other animated pictures, who turns out to be a lot more sympathetic and interesting than he seems at first blush.
It's not one of the top-tier of Pixar films, but it's definitely one of the best in the middle-tier. If you have the patience to wait through the first leg of the story, the rest of the film is worth it.