Coco

Coco, Disney/Pixar's new animated feature, is a spectacular melodrama exploiting imagery associated with the Mexican Dia de los Muertos.  The film is scrupulously politically correct, although, I suppose, some may find elements of the movie offensive on general principals  -- there's no doubt that John Lasseter, who produced this film, has engaged in cultural appropriation (or misappropriation) on a colossal scale.  (Lee Unkrich directed.) The picture is grandiose, but slow-moving -- there is some brilliant imagery but like most of Miyazaki's movies (Lasseter's acknowledged Sensei), the film is too long and too complex.  Furthermore, Coco has to establish an entire mythology constructed around the Day of the Dead, complete with various rules and procedures governing the skeletal specters and their lavishly ornamented world.  This drags the movie to a stop on several occasions, requires preachy interludes, and causes the film to be tiresomely serious, even, I think excessively reverent.  Furthermore, the plot is too dire to entertain children -- the story involves a broken home, a family deserted by their father, and a reconciliation in the Afterworld that, then, seeps back into the world of the living -- there is a lot of familial Sturm und Drang (or the Mexican equivalent) and, at times, the earnestly constructed and laborious plot involves elements that would seem to be more at home in a play by Eugene O'Neil than a Disney movie.  (That said, the film has a couple of brilliant plot twists that I didn't see coming and that revived my interest in the narration just as it was flagging.)  I'm not sure exactly how Lasseter and his Pixar wizards calculated the appeal of the film -- although I note that when I saw the picture there were a number of large Mexican families in attendance and they seem to watch the film with rapt attention (albeit a bit dutifully as well.)  The subject matters seem to me to be too serious for small children and, yet, a lot of the film's byplay -- for instance, the Oaxacan "spirit guides" (Alebrijes) with their multi-colored coats and wings are too whimsical for adults and teenagers. 

Coco's plot concerns a multi-generational family curse.  In the 1930's, a gifted musician abandoned his family to seek a show-business career.  The musician's spurned wife banned all music from the family -- no one is allowed to even hum or sing or whistle.  The family becomes successful in their village, running a cottage industry making shoes.  The film's hero, a teenage boy named Miguel, senses that he has the heart of a musician and wants to perform for the public -- but his family forbids him this occupation.  On the Day of the Dead, the boy plots to perform at a village talent show, but his fearsome Abuela destroys his guitar.  The hero breaks into the tomb of a popular singer from the village, Ernesto de la Cruz, and steals his guitar.  But as this occurs, through magic, the boy finds himself transported into the world of the dead.  There he has various adventures, most featuring a chase in which he flees deceased uncles and aunts and grandparents who attempt to keep him performing with the specter of his hero, the great de la Cruz.  Like Dorothy in Oz, Miguel has his Toto with him, a Xoloitzcuintl hairless hound named Dante.  Various mythological rules are imposed on the Afterlife -- when the last living person on earth forgets you, your ghost vanishes.  (This is called the "2nd Death".)  Dead people can only visit their families on the Day of the Dead if their photograph or likeness has been posted on the family Ofrenda.  A living person in the kingdom of the dead can only return back to the land of living if they are blessed by one of their dead relatives in the colorful Hades that the film portrays.  There are other rules, many of them more or less creepy.  Indeed, many elements in the film are strangely topical and, therefore, have a creepy sinister edge.  Much to do is made about border crossings -- there are border guards who use computer imaging to determine whether a dead person can enter the world of the living on the Dia de los Muertos and those who are not remembered by their families and, properly, memorialized are denied access at the frontier.  This leads to a curious question of whether the United States is the land of the living or the land of the dead -- in other words where do Mexico and the US lie with respect to this contested, nasty and overtly cruel border.  (There is some sense that the land of the Dead is the US because there people seem to be forgotten and simply vanish -- it's as if an emigrant who is forgotten by his family in Mexico somehow ceases to exist.)  Of course, many Mexican families are, in effect, without male authority figures because the fathers and uncles are away in the States earning a living and, in fact, sending money back to the Old Country -- this state of affairs seems symbolized by a picture showing a Mexican family with the image of the father ripped out of the family portrait.  The concept of the missing father who abandons his family is central to the film and the weird and strangely harsh imagery showing the border crossing (with spooks trying to sneak across the border) probably has resonance with Mexican audiences that is unsettling and powerful.  The film also exploits the sentimental Mexican concept of Familia in ways that American audiences might find problematic -- the plot involves characters faced with the decision of following their own aspirations or sacrificing themselves to Familia.  The film sets up these conflicts and, then, skirts them, but the level of reverence and authority afforded the concept of extended family is likely to disturb many Americans.  The picture is extremely beautiful -- there are virtuosic exhibitions of visionary animation:  the world of the dead is a series of coral-reefs made up of Mexican villages stacked in DNA-style spirals in luminous space and there all sorts monsters, dark chasms, and, even, a vast Cenote representing, it seems, the Mayan Xibalba or Kingdom of the Dead.  The Mexican village where the living characters reside is also exquisitely detailed and the scenes in the graveyard lit with innumerable candles, light reflecting off drifts of brilliantly gold and orange marigold blossoms, are extremely beautiful (these images are also realistic -- they reminded me of cemeteries that I saw in Oaxaca City on the Dia de los Muertos.) Indeed, the film's entire color scheme is gorgeous.  But the film is, I'm afraid to say, more than a little bit of a chore -- and the musical numbers, although spectacular in some cases, are pretty much forgettable.  I wanted to like this picture, but couldn't quite succeed.