"Coco" Review
Pixar is known for tackling mature subject matter (with the exception of the first two Cars movies) and "Coco" centres around the Day of the Dead which is the Mexican celebration of families and friends and the memories of the dead. Having been raised in North America, I found it very hard to talk about the dead since we for some reason prefer to repress the idea of our own mortality. With Coco (and 2014's "The Book of Life" which is a movie that "Coco" will inevitably be compared to) you can sit down with your loved ones and with kids and talk about death through the lens of this movie. For me, this is what makes a movie like Coco so special.
We meet Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) who lives with a household whom have banned music from their lives. The conflict is, Miguel wants to follow in the footsteps of his hero, the legendary musician Ernesto de la Cruz and be a musician himself. This is indeed very formulaic and so is the majority of the movie. Though Pixar's writing team has all the emotional beats down to an exact science. I think when a shady character like Hector (Gael García Bernal) is introduced and gradually becomes the heart of the movie, that's when all the pieces started to come together in the signature Pixar fashion and proceeded to reduce me to a emotional wreck.
Everyone kind of knows that Pixar is one of the greatest animation studios out there, and it goes without saying, but this movie is gorgeous. There's so much attention to detail. Every note plucked and chord strummed on a guitar is the real deal. Every part of the living world and land of the dead look authentic as if it actually exists in real life. Just when I thought I've seen it all with hair and water animation, Coco takes it up another notch somehow. It's bananas, man.
Simply put, Coco is great. For me, it's in the upper echelon of Pixar films. It has so much going for it. Sure, there are some suspension of disbelief with the logistics of the system that connects the living with the dead and the score and music (with the exception "Remember Me") is a bit too traditional and generic sounding for my personal tastes but it's very minor and insignificant to what the movie is able to achieve from an emotional and spiritual standpoint. Please go watch this movie.