The lynchpin of Pixar’s new animated feature, Coco, is Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. In the out-of-time Mexico of Coco’s setting, Día de los Muertos is that time each autumn when the barrier between worlds becomes tissue thin. Families stock their home altars, the ofrendas, with photographs of their deceased and offerings of food. The ancestors return to Earth that day, and in Coco, the point is that they persist because they are remembered by the living. Forgotten, they have no existence.
The protagonist is a 12-year-old, Miguel Rivera (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), determined to become a musician despite the unmovable opposition of his family. His great-great grandfather was a musician who abandoned wife and child to follow his muse. As a result, music has been strictly banned from the Rivera household. Even whistling into a bottle is forbidden. The Riveras are a loving family but turn into blue meanies at the sound of music, and have torn the face of their musician forebear from the photo on their ofrenda.
Miguel is only encouraged by his ambition when he discovers that his hero and role model, a 1930s star called Ernesto de la Cruz, was the mysterious missing great-great grandfather. But that’s not the only twist in a story that races from the land of the living through the land of the dead once Miguel slips through the barrier and finds himself among the dead, lively skeletons one and all.
The after-life is reached across a bridge of orange flowers and is a fantastically drawn conception of terraced and cantilevered structures rising toward heaven in candy box colors. Accompanied by his faithful dog Dante as he crosses the circles of a realm too happy to be hellish, Miguel searches for the sombrero-wearing Ernesto (Benjamin Bratt) with the help of the comically inept dead man Hector (Gael García Bernal). Thwarting him at every step is his late great-great grandmother, Imelda (Alanna Ubach), who long ago decreed the family’s ban on music.
The skeletons are kinetic, falling apart and reassembling themselves in a snap, and capable of giving chase. Miguel must disguise himself under makeup and a hoodie because the dead are spooked by the presence of a living person in their world.
As always, the level of Pixar’s software-drawn animation is high, as is, even more crucially, the screenplay. Family, whether fish or dinosaur or urban professional, is key to Pixar’s ethos—as is the necessity for children to grow into the best version of themselves. The potential for conflict that always exists between collective and individual good plays out acutely in Coco, whose protagonist has a high barrier of resentment to surmount if he hopes to receive his family’s blessing. Coco’s title character in this multi-generational tale is Miguel’s grandmother, wizened, shriveled and drifting between forgetfulness and sleep—a sadly moving figure of old age respected. She was the little girl the musical ancestor abandoned. Can she accept Miguel’s love of music?
The path to reconciling Miguel with his family history twists and turns, leading, among other things, to the shattering of idols and the realization that the darkness of avarice can hide within the glamor of the performing arts. And yet, creativity and its expression are essential to those who feel called to the profession of artist. It’s a hard road for Miguel and the suspense over the outcome carries into the colorfully choreographed climax.
