14/01/18

Pixar Animation Studios can generally be counted on to provide quality entertainment but it’s been a little while since they truly knocked something out of the park. Here’s a film that puts them right back where they belong. In a move that seems destined to send this film plummeting to the bottom of President Trump’s ‘to watch’ list, Coco is a celebration of Mexico and its culture. It’s a dazzling, inventive and sometimes surreal love letter to the country and, for once, the makers have got it absolutely right, employing Mexican talent in just about every area of this charming production.

Young Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) longs to be a mariachi, just like his hero, the late (and locally born) Mexican screen star, Ernesto De La Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). But there’s a problem. Miguel’s great-great-grandmother was married to a musician who abandoned her and her baby daughter – the eponymous Coco – for the lure of fame and fortune, so now, generations later, music is a taboo subject around the home. Instead, everyone is involved in the family shoe-making business, where Miguel is expected to one day take his place.

As the story starts, it’s fast approaching November 1st, when families across Mexico celebrate El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), where everyone congregates in the local cemetery to enjoy a feast along with their departed relatives. When Miguel hears that there is to be a talent contest in the town square, he is determined to enter it, but for that he needs a guitar – his own, home made effort has been smashed to pieces by his over protective grandmother, Mama Imelda (Alanna Ubach). So Miguel sneaks into de la Cruz’s tomb, intending to borrow the late star’s famous guitar. In doing so, he inadvertently manages to slip between worlds and finds himself stranded in a land populated entirely by the dead – and it’s here that he meets Hector (Gail Garcia Bernal), a guitar-playing skeleton who is desperately trying to get back to his own loved ones on the other side…

Coco is such a ravishing feast for the senses, it’s hard to know where to begin with the superlatives. It looks absolutely astonishing in just about every frame, the music is terrific and the story is funny and inventive. Perhaps most importantly, it perpetuates that great Pixar tradition where it can be enjoyed as much by the parents as their offspring. Interestingly, the film has a PG certificate – after all it does deal predominantly with the afterlife – but it would be a sensitive child indeed who’d feel threatened by its lively cast of skeletons and colourful alebrijes (the spirit animals who look after the dead). The title Coco, by the way, refers to Miguel’s ailing great-grandmother, and the way she has been characterised probably deserves some kind of an award all by itself. This is animation at its most accomplished.

Ultimately though, how refreshing to see a depiction of Mexico that isn’t peopled by drug-dealing gangs, intent on torture and murder, but by loving families, who realise only too well that people only truly die when they are forgotten by the living. Perhaps this should be required viewing for all those Americans who believe the best way to deal with Mexico is to wall it off.

But I’m being way too political. Coco is perhaps best enjoyed as a slice of pure entertainment. This advance screening is surprisingly empty, but maybe the word just hasn’t got around yet. The news that is has already outgrossed the earnings of all twelve previous Pixar releases in China alone would suggest that the Disney empire is on target for yet another massive hit – and, in this case, it’s one that’s totally deserved.

Don’t you dare miss this. And don’t go thinking that if you haven’t got kids in tow, you can’t go along and enjoy it. Trust me, you’ll love it, whatever age you happen to be.

5 stars

Philip Caveney