Grownups who are wont to mutter, “Animation? You mean … cartoons!? I’m a goddamn adult!”
should know that Pixar has an excellent track record of providing entertainments that are genuinely for the whole family, with well-crafted storylines and dialogue, solid voice work and ravishing visuals. “Ratatouille” is still their most magnificent achievement but I have to say that “Coco,” Pixar’s Dia de Muertos-themed banquet for the eyes, follows closely on its heels, especially in terms of sheer dazzling spectacle. And like the aforementioned Paris-set, food-centric movie, the exhaustive research conducted leading up to Coco’s production shows in its painstakingly detailed, lived in ‘toonscapes.
Coco’s basic plot is fairly lean: Miguel Rivera (voiced by newcomer Anthony Gonzalez) is a Mexican boy in a tight-knit family of cobblers who yearns to follow in the footsteps of his great-great-grandfather and be a musician, an aspiration his family – especially his domineering grandmother – is dead-set against; hanging over the family for generations like the smell of rotten eggs is said grandfather’s abandonment of his wife and children to pursue a career in music. During his small pueblo’s Day of the Dead celebration, Miguel is accidentally whisked to a plane of existence which allows him to interact with the skeletal souls of the deceased relatives drawn to the pueblo by the altars constructed by their living descendants. Plot gears grind and he winds up searching for his legendary great-great grandfather in the labyrinthine, multi-colored city of the dead, accompanied by his slobbering, faithful xoloitzcuintle dog (a hairless Mexican breed said to accompany souls to the underworld) and a mischievous denizen of the underworld named Hector (voiced by Mexican superstar Gael Garcia Bernal), also a musician.
Sharp-eared statesiders may also recognize the voices of Benjamin Bratt as the legendary musician Miguel spends much of the movie pursuing; the prodigiously pock-marked Edward James Olmos in a small but touching cameo role, and Cheech Marin, who plays a corrections officer in the city of the dead. Many of the other roles, both major and minor, are performed by Mexican actors.
While director/creator Lee Unkrich ably blends the movie’s contrasting tones of quick-moving humor, mostly-unforced sentimentality and pathos, he could have eliminated one or two unnecessary cliff-hangers from the film’s climax. That’s a minor quibble, though; the movie is diverting, whimsical-but-not-cloying fun. And at the risk of waxing overly rhapsodic, every frame begs to be paused and pored over, especially for those interested in catching the film’s many references to Mexican cultural life, be they in the area of arts and crafts, architecture or food.
For instance, the movie’s intro brilliantly utilizes a series of multi-colored crepe-paper (papel picado) flags to tell the story of the betrayal that led to music being banned in the Rivera household. The orange flower known as flor de cempasuchil, whose petals are strewn on the ground of cemeteries in such a way as to guide souls to their families’ altars, is made copious use of both visually and as a plot element; and alebrijes, little psychedelic toy animals originally from Oaxaca, while not technically part of any Dia de Muertos tradition, are a constant, eye-tantalizing presence.
For Mexican citizens, the movie bursts at the seams with touchstones both subliminal, subtle and overt. My Tapatia partner-in-crime gasped in recognition at what she told me was the movie’s impeccable recreation of Mexico City’s cavernous, Art Nouveau-ish post office (El Palacio de Correos), used to portray the central bureaucracy of the dead souls’ metropolis. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera make appearances, of course – soft ball references for U.S. audiences – but so do suave, mid-century crooners like Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, as well as El Santo, without a doubt the most famous of Mexico’s masked luchadores and the star of a series of lucha libre/monster movies in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
While I have little doubt the film will be a boon to merchandise hawkers eager to cash on the Dia de los Muertos craze that may soon follow, I challenge naysayers, and those who decry the holiday’s appropriation by people who know little about its many coded meanings and traditions, to find fault with the movie’s educational value. If ignorance of tradition is the bone that people most often pick when speaking about cultural appropriation, then those who choose to cling to skepticism – an understandable attitude, since a Disney-sponsored portrayal of Dia de los Muertos is a bitter pill to swallow for anybody possessed of a healthy skepticism – will have to bolster it with some interesting mental gymnastics.