By: Abeeha Shahid
While people expected a repetition of the same overused, Mexican Day of the Dead tropes, Coco brought something completely engaging and touching to the table. With sweet musical numbers and a daring quest, brought together with a heartfelt tale and beautiful animation, Coco, is a movie that backs its success.
It is Pixar’s nineteenth movie, but its first with a nonwhite protagonist; Lee Unkrich, the director and creator of the initial story, is white.“Coco” is the first movie to have both an all-Latino cast and a nine-figure budget. It grossed more than eight hundred million dollars worldwide, won two Oscars, and became the biggest blockbuster in Mexican history.
The wondrous animation makes the movie a brilliant work of art, with meticulous attention-to-detail, apparent in the display of emotion on the characters faces and every little object in the background that comes together to bring the fictional world to life. It highlights and respectfully represents the beliefs the Mexican culture pertains to, regarding the Day of the Dead in a manner that allows people, irrespective of their varying customs, to relate to the characters and the sentiments about this tradition.
The movie transports us to a rich, bursting with colour, fictional Mexican town of Santa Cecilia - named after the patron saint of musicians - following the story of a 12 year old boy named Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) who dreams of becoming a musician but is hindered by the ban on music insinuated by Coco - Miguel’s great grandmother- due to her father abandoning her and the family in pursuit of a music career.
The family refuses any association with music and picks up a business of making shoes and removes the man's image from the family photograph without which an ofrenda can not be for the Day of the Dead when the deceased come back for a visit. Not ready to give up music, Miguel teaches himself to play the guitar in the attic by watching videos of bygone Ernesto del la Cruz, who Miguel idolises.
On the Day of the Dead, he accidentally shatters a framed photograph on the family ofrenda, then spots a hidden detail in the picture, one that makes him suspect that his wayward ancestor was in fact de la Cruz himself. In order to convince his family of the importance of music he sprints to the museum to borrow del la Cruz’s guitar. Instead the guitar turns him invisible and whisks him away to the Land of the Dead.
He finds himself unable to go back to the Land of the Living and realises he must get the blessing of his relative in order to leave. On his journey he meets a mischievous soul, Hector, whose body has a bad habit of collapsing and reforming with a sound of a Xylophone clatter.
Together, Miguel, Hector and Dante - Miguel’s dog- continue on their mission to find la Cruz so Miguel can get home.
Coco, is a movie in which death is the subject not a plot point or an event that sets ground for character development. It introduces us to the concept of “final death” , which implies that those who reside in The Land of the Dead can only continue to do so as long as there is someone to remember them in the land of the living. This concept of “final death” comes straight from traditional Mexican ideas of the “three deaths”. The first death is the physical death of the body. The second death is when the body is laid to rest in the earth and returned to the natural cycle. The “third death” is what’s mentioned in the movie as final, is the moment the last memory of you fades, making the inclusion of the song Remember Me, heartbreaking.
It is a movie about family, the dead, afterlife, culture. Slowly builds towards overwhelming emotional moments that you find yourself wiping away your tears before you can comprehend the scenes. Coco is definitely a must watch.
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