Review: Coco

Coco (PG)
USA 2017  105 mins  Dir: Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina Cast (voices): Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt

Much has been made of Pixar’s respectful approach to Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos celebrations and the recruitment of an all-Latino voice cast, as parent company Disney seeks to tiptoe through the cultural sensitivity minefield that threatened to blow up in the face of Moana. (The depiction of demigod Maui as a fatty was deemed by some to be a stereotypical portrayal of Polynesians, you’ll recall.) So is it possible to make a feature animation on this subject that’s free of the taint of ‘cultural appropriation’ but isn’t as dull as ditchwater? Well, with Coco, Toy Story 3 co-director Lee Unkrich has succeeded in turning out a solidly entertaining, B-grade Pixar flick. It’s not in a same league as WALL-E, Up or Inside Out. But nor is it as depressingly mediocre as those Cars movies.

It starts in familiar territory with 12-year-old Miguel Rivera (Gonzalez) as that traditional figure from family animation: the character with a burning passion, who’s thwarted at every turn. All he wants to do is play music like Mexican legend Ernesto de la Cruz (Bratt – he’s of part indigenous Peruvian heritage, since you ask), whose cheesy old Elvis-style movies the lad soaks up whenever they’re shown on TV. But poor Miguel has the misfortune to be a member of a humble shoemaker family in which music is forbidden because his great-great-grandfather abandoned his wife and daughter to pursue twanging’n’crooning fame and fortune. After perhaps a little too much of this scene-setting, Miguel breaks into Ernesto’s mausoleum on the Dia de los Muertos and pilfers his guitar, unleashing a curse that sees him whisked to the suitably colourful Land of the Dead, where he meets his ancestors and tracks down his musical hero.

Coco begins to take flight at this point, with a terrific depiction of the bustling, vibrant Land of the Dead, which is populated by unthreatening, PG-rated skeletal folk boasting colourfully decorated skulls, who seem to have rather more fun than the living. Unkrich manages to incorporate plenty of Mexican folklore into the story without bogging it down with unnecessary reverence or solemnity, while adding some neat modern touches. An example: the dead rely on the living to display their photographs in ofrenda to secure passage across the orange marigold petal-strewn bridge to the Land of the Living on the big day. But how is this policed? In Coco, there’s a high-tech customs post on the border, where those who are on the verge of being forgotten are turned back.

Pleasingly, Miguel is also equipped with a mutt, inevitably named Dante. He won’t be challenging Dug in our Pixar Comedy Dog affections, but is at least a proper scraggy, mostly hairless Mexican street hound with a lolling tongue, who’s memorably described as resembling “a sausage someone dropped in a barber’s shop”. Along the way, our hero also hooks up with mysterious trickster Hector (Bernal), who’s desperate to find a way across the bridge and juggles his bones like an extra from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. The only element that doesn’t really fit dramatically or stylistically is the introduction of psychedelic ‘spirit animals’, which seem to have wandered in from a different movie altogether.

Miguel’s race-against-time mission feels a bit mechanical, but, without giving too much away, there’s a reassuringly Pixar-esque twist exploring the dark side of Ernesto’s glib, fortune cookie ‘seize the moment/follow your heart’ philosophy, which you’d never find in those boilerplate animations from inferior studios. And just as the similarly themed, Guillermo del Toro-produced The Book of Life taught us that even dead people can be better dads, Coco‘s big hokey moral – “nothing is more important than family” – at least extends beyond the grave.