Pretty, but flawed.

Rating: 3/10 (27 November 2017)

I was thrilled to see that Disney had finally released a high-profile film with a little boy as the protagonist, as their output of the last decade or more has been solely tailored to build the self-esteem of girls... evidently not realizing the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. My surprise and relief didn't last long. First, the addition of the 21-minute Frozen "short" was a strong indicator that they felt a "boy movie" would need to give some incentive to pull in their preferred audience. Then the film actually started...
I know they mean well, but I wish there were just one person in the organization who would think for a moment about the message they send to boys. It's as though they've forgotten boys have eyes and ears, too. And their message is this: boys only matter as long as they're providing or protecting, and if they're not doing that, they're villains. In Wreck-It Ralph they went as far as suggesting suicide would be a noble way to save the little girl, and in Coco they made it clear that not even being murdered lifts those responsibilities. It's disturbing. It would have been so simple not to send this message with Coco... all they had to do was make Coco a boy. But they couldn't do that because no one is expected to sympathize with boys unless they're striving for someone else. And they hammered the point home by, at the very end, making sure we saw that the next generation of the family's children was also a girl, continuing the lineage of people that really matter, with Miguel no longer being useful. If they'd even just made that infant a boy in its brief appearance it would have mitigated the message somewhat. But they weren't prepared to do that. Disney was built on stories that had universal appeal. Is it not time to start taking Lassetter's Disney to task for what they're teaching today's children?