Divine

Rating: 10/10 (4 June 2018)

Pixar delves deeper into the realm of difficult and hard to visually conceptualise subject areas with its family-friendly film about death, 'Coco', while setting the story in Mexico with the main character, a young boy striving to become a musician named Miguel, classifying as a minority under Trump's America. The Land of the Dead, the setting for a large portion of the film, is an interpretation of traditional Mexican beliefs that are realised in the film alongside a deliberate avoidance of any religious connotations or messages. The dog - a Xoloitzcuintli, native animals to Mesoamerica historically believed to guide dead souls to the underworld - is named Dante in reference to the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whom travelled through the underworld and returned in his epic, 'The Divine Comedy', ultimately to the same objective as Miguel in informing the living of the greater truth that they have learnt in their travels. As much as Dante's Divine Comedy is structured around the religious values that shaped medieval understandings of the world, 'Coco' is about family, and its messages are equally about the bringing about of a more socially unified world. Especially in the current climate where social division has been prevailing more than ever in recent times, commonly reflected through the sentiment pervading border control policies, 'Coco' provides a vision of all the good that perhaps we have been forgetting, and a landscape where border control is not about division but about bringing families together.