Coco

photo courtesy of bleedingcool.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     This Thanksgiving weekend saw the release of Pixar’s latest original film, Coco. Despite some missteps, Pixar is still a studio known for its thoughtful, family-oriented animated features, with heavyweights like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up, and Inside Out under its belt. Heartwarming and transporting, Coco earns its place alongside those esteemed movies; it ranks not only as one of Pixar’s best films to date, but also as possibly the best movie released so far this year.

     In Coco, a young boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) lives in the fictional village of Santa Cecilia, Mexico on Día de Muertos. Miguel’s family earns its living making shoes, but Miguel wants to follow in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather, an esteemed musician named Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), who left his family behind to purse his path to stardom. Unfortunately for Miguel, his Abuelita (Renée Victor) and his great-grandmother Mamá Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguía) have upheld the family tradition of forbidding music ever since Ernesto’s departure, fearing its negative influence. After a series of unexpected events, Miguel finds himself in the Land of the Dead, a colorful world from which the dead return to visit their living descendants every year. There, Miguel will have to find help from his divided family, who still scorn music, and a new friend, Hector, (Gael García Bernal) to get back to the land of the living in one piece.

photo courtesy of variety.com

     Story-wise, Coco is pretty straightforward… at least on paper. The young hero goes, the young hero comes back (with the help of a few trusty deus ex machinas, incidentally), and the young hero learns lessons along the way. Yet Coco is anything but rote; the movie is a treasure trove of surprises, thrills, jokes, awe-inspiring vistas, transporting imagination, resounding emotional crescendos, and the kind of quiet, still moments that are rare in tentpole movies these days… let alone animated kid’s features.

     Coco exudes an infectious warmth. It’s partly due to humor, which, in Coco, is inventive and earnest, stemming as much from long-running Frida Kahlo gags and physical comedy as from dialogue. It’s also due to the movie’s wonderful music (and equally wonderful performers), with songs written by Robert and Kristin-Anderson Lopez, the duo behind Frozen’s showstoppers, and a real reverence for guitar. And it is due, in large part, to the messages that animate the movie’s story: the importance of family, the cost of pursuing dreams, the value of remembrance, the power of the truth, the choice that stands before every person about what will matter in his or her life.

photo courtesy of cnn.com

     As is becoming a hallmark for Pixar’s original films, Coco displays wondrous, vibrant, immersive animation. It’s meticulous, from its recreation of Mexico—whose culture and traditions, by the way, the movie makes a point of honoring—to its imaginative Land of the Dead. You need look no further than the striking first shot of the Land of the Dead or the intricate animation of Mamá Coco to get a sense of the craftmanship that goes into this thing.

     If I haven’t got the point across thus far, let me state it plainly: there’s something very special about Coco. It’s an elusive something, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s that it has the courage to create real, three-dimensional, honest-to-goodness characters, and lets us get to know them in intimate ways. Maybe it’s the movie’s respect for the elderly and ailing. Maybe it’s that it feels so distinctly wholesome. Or maybe it’s just that unlike most of the kid’s films released this year (and most of the movies advertised before it began), Coco contains not a single butt or fart joke. Whatever the cause, in Coco Pixar has one of its most magical releases in years.

photo courtesy of youtube.com

     Having run the risk of over-hyping the movie, let me now switch, briefly, to another (related) topic. Coco begins a good 40 minutes after the scheduled theater time. Why? Well, to begin with, there’s 20 minutes of commercials, which is fairly typical these days. But what makes up that remaining 20 minutes? A little thing called Olaf’s Frozen Adventure. Disney is calling it a “short.” Pixar movies usually come with a short tacked on to the beginning, but it’s usually Pixar who produces it (this comes from Disney Animation studios), and it’s usually delightful, whimsical, or otherwise enjoyable. Boasting no less than five—yes, that’s right, five—songs and one key change, Olaf’s Frozen Adventure is neither delightful nor whimsical nor in any way enjoyable. It’s a nuisance, shamelessly designed for the sole purpose of revving up interest in the Frozen brand before the sequel debuts in 2019. Tacking on a 20-minute short film to a two-hour movie and calling it a short is not only inconvenient, it’s absurd and offensive… and you know what? It’s a pretty dumb short, too. Viewer beware. 

Watch Coco's trailer here. 

photo courtesy of nytimes.com