A Celebration of a Living Culture for the Dead (Might Be Too Hard an Act To Follow for Pixar)

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2018)

Coco is the 19th feature movie produced under the banner of the trailblazing Pixar Animation Studios and is another resounding triumph for critics and audiences alike. The four reasons that makes it so are the setting of the story, the use of original songs, the quality of the animation itself, and for telling a story with morals.
The story takes place in Mexico during the celebration of the Day of the Dead when people commemorate and pay their respects to their departed ones. There are a lot of points in Mexico's culture that the writers could have chosen but choosing this colorful setting for the story really gives the movie a strong base for something fresh and original to build on with the other aspects.
A significant aspect of the movie that is predetermined by the setting are the songs used. For the lot of movies produced by Pixar, you can note their use of original songs and how they impact much of the storytelling. With Coco, the songs feature a Mexican style for sound which adds to the movie's cultural flair. The one entitled "Remember Me" which won for the film the Academy Award for Best Original Song is one that will stay with you long after watching the film for sheer emotion.
Coco is also an exhibition of Pixar's finest work in animation yet. Each part is a testament of the effort to capture the essence of Mexico's culture and to strike balance between expressionist artistry and capturing real life. The move manages to give a feeling of other-wordliness and at the same time almost a fluid realism.
Last but not the least, if people won't buy the movie's achievements in the technical department, it would still be a triumph for the story it tells, a cross section of a vast culture that's seldom fleshed out entirely which focus on music and family. You may have caught a glimpse of the Day of the Dead in the opening sequence of the last Bond movie, Spectre and you may have thought that George Romero's zombie film of the same name is about it. But it is in this movie that the Mexican Celebration gets into spotlight on its own for the world to see. As one from another country, I applaud the makers for telling the story in the most artistic way they can without compromising the importance of the story's morals thus, continuing the Pixar tradition of responsible entertainment. Truly, it is a story that can deeply affect the audience and make the world a better place.
Given that Coco excels in a lot of departments, it has downside. Despite telling a story in a unique setting, venturing to another country and showcasing another culture, some of the plot devices that drove the story have already been used in the previous Pixar Movies, that if you are one that follows closely their output you would immediately notice some scenes are play out very similar to the ones in Monsters Inc, Inside Out, Up, and Toy Story 2. Now, the makers could argue that this could be a form of Homage or a technique to imprint their signature but one can't help being alarmed about a possible diminishing of original ideas from the company that brought us out-of-the box, revolutionary animated tales such as Wall-E, Up, and the Toy Story Trilogy that captured our imagination.
Though at this point Pixar seemed to have set the bar too high for itself with its latest effort, their recent outputs all together are beginning to show a formulaic approach to storytelling with frequent self-referencing and also resorting to release sequels to their originals which is not bad at all but as a moviegoer you crave something new especially with the talents and resources Pixar has.
With the many accomplishments the creators have garnered with this noteworthy movie, it is good to hope that they will be able to create more imaginative, original, culturally diverse movies in the future.