We find ourselves in Mexico, where a kid called Miguel (voiced by Anthony
Gonzalez) lives in a small town with his extended family, including his ancient
great-grandmother Coco, who is poignantly on the verge of succumbing to
dementia. Miguel dreams of being a musician such as the mega-celebrity singer
Ernesto De La Cruz (voiced by Benjamin Bratt) who became a screen star and
recording legend before being crushed to death by a falling bell in 1942. But, like
Billy Elliot shoved into the boxing ring, Miguel is all set to join the family’s trade:
making shoes.
The reason is that his folks have their own deeply internalised betrayal myth:
Coco’s father was a vagabond musician who ran out on a young wife and infant
daughter to chase his musical dreams. The family has sworn never to have
anything to do with music and has even torn this man’s image from the family
photograph: that vitally important image without which an ofrenda cannot be
made for the Day of the Dead when the departed come back for a visit.
Morbid? No – Coco is the latest
children’s film with a crucial life
lesson
Lucinda Everett
Read more
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Miguel makes what he thinks is a sensational discovery: this disgraced ancestor
was in fact the legendary lantern-jawed charmer Ernesto de la Cruz, and when a
cosmic quirk of fate puts Miguel accidentally in the Land of the Dead, his mission
is to make contact with De la Cruz and get his all-important blessing to return to
the living world and pursue his musical destiny.
Of course, in the time-honoured style, Miguel needs a quirky/unreliable helpmeet
for the journey and this is a deceased scallywag called Héctor (voiced by Gael
García Bernal) whose body has a habit of collapsing and reforming with a
xylophone clatter. As with all the comic wingmen in this kind of film, Héctor is a
mix of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.
In the real world, the Day of the Dead, with its endlessly Instagrammable images,
is danger of becoming the west’s condescending gap-year obsession. Coco –
which can be compared to the Guillermo del Toro-produced movie The Book of
Life – takes a particular line on this phenomenon: that it is an empowering,
family-friendly folk myth that puts us in touch with our heritage.
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Watch the trailer for Coco
Another way of thinking about it is that it’s a raucous, satirically challenging and
deliberately transgressive tradition that glories in the physical intractability of
death and thereby mocks the pretensions of powerful but all-too-mortal rulers:
which is, incidentally, the tradition that Eisenstein responded to for
his unrealised Mexico film Que Viva Mexico!
Well, that is not what Coco is about; it is more emollient. Perhaps like Orpheus
with his lyre, Miguel’s way with a guitar will get him back to the world of life and
the world of music, without which, of course, a living death is all he has to look
forward to wherever he happens to be.
He, and we, absorb the news that the Land of the Dead is not the same as
eternity. These vivified skeletons beyond the grave exist there only as long as
someone back on Earth remembers them, which is why the photo piety of the
domestic shrine is so important. It is a gigantic Valhalla of private and public
celebrity. Oblivion means death and De la Cruz’s most famous song was called
Remember Me. This is a charming and very memorable film.
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