Review: Coco delivers Pixar’s best technical and emotional magic

A boy searches for music in the land of the dead in a plot twistier than a telenovela.

Like Pixar's greatest films, such as Toy Story, Up, and Inside Out, the Thanksgiving weekend treat Coco is a gorgeously rendered fantasy about the good and bad (but mostly good) of family life. Set in small town Mexico on Día de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, it's both a color-saturated homage to this ancient Mexican tradition and a loving portrait of a family learning to accept the perspective of a new generation.

The story revolves around 12-year-old Miguel, who spends every day after school helping with the family shoe-making business. There's just one problem in Miguel's life. All he really wants to do is become a mariachi, singing and playing guitar like the 1940s musical star Ernesto de la Cruz. But his family hates music, going all the way back to his great-great-grandmother, Imelda. She founded the family shoe business to support her daughter after her husband abandoned them to become a musician. When Miguel's abuelita—Emelda's granddaughter—discovers Miguel's guitar, she smashes it. Miguel can't take it anymore, and he flees home in tears.

Racing through the streets just as Día de Muertos celebrations are just getting started, Miguel makes a few iffy choices and winds up transported to the Land of the Dead. Followed by his adorable street dog friend Dante over a bridge made of orange flower petals, Miguel finds himself in a glowing, multi-layered city of gondolas and neon rainbow-furred flying animals. Ghosts who look exactly like Día de Muertos skeletons are everywhere, their bony faces vivid and emotionally expressive. There are a lot of satirical touches too, like when the dead line up at Disneyland-like gates to get in and out of the Land of the Dead. It's a sumptuous and funny visual sequence that will fill even a cynic's heart with wonder.

This kind of moment represents Pixar at its best, and co-directors Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3) and Adrian Molina have done an excellent job using digital beauty to tell a genuinely moving story. You see, the dead can return to the land of the living, but only if living people have remembered to put out their pictures in special Día de Muertos shrines heaped with food and other offerings. That's why the down-on-his-luck ghost Hector offers to help Miguel get home—if Miguel will put his photograph in a shrine.

Miguel and Hector go on an adventure that includes a delightful musical extravaganza (Anthony Gonzalez sings his heart out as Miguel) plus a silly but also weirdly accurate parody of Frida Kahlo. Coco manages to veer from goofy skeleton slapstick to emo moments gracefully. It's a tough balance, but again this is what Pixar is known for: a kind of technical and emotional virtuosity, where visuals play on our heartstrings as much as the plot itself.
And speaking of the plot, this movie will take you in directions you never expected. Like a telenovela, it has crazy double-crossings and shocking revelations and tearful romantic reunions. It's all very gentle, so you can rest easy about sharing it with children. But it's still surprising and layered enough to satisfy adults. At times, the movie even becomes a philosophical meditation on what it means to be remembered after death—and why true art is about love, not fame.

Coco is also about merging the best of modern VFX with ancient tradition. Unkrich has said his first inspiration for this film came from looking at pictures of Día de Muertos, imagining how he'd animate the brightly-colored decorations and elaborate costumes. But as a white guy from Ohio, he knew immediately that he couldn't do this film without some serious research. In the end, as he told the New York Times, he broke Pixar's longstanding rule of not sharing works-in-progress with outsiders by consulting with dozens of Latino community leaders, experts, and regular people living in Mexico. He also brought Mexican-American writer Molina on board as co-director. The team even embedded themselves with families in Oaxaca and Guanajuato just to get a sense of everyday life in a Mexican household.

Of course, this isn't just about cultural sensitivity. The Latino audience is big and getting bigger, and Disney knows that. But Coco never feels like a crass bid for foreign markets. Instead, it comes across as a celebration of the ways culture can unite us across borders—even when those borders are between the land of the dead and the living.