My Review of "Coco"

Coco is a Pixar movie that came out back in 2017. I could have swore I reviewed this movie before but it was before I was on Vocal Media. Luckily I got the chance to see the movie again. After watching it again I have a new found appreciation for this film. It talks about so much and layered in so many ways that it still got to me after repeat viewings.

The movie starts off with a young boy named Miguel and his loving relationship with his grandmother Coco. He's obsessed by this old singer/actor by the name of Ernesto de la Cruz. He's watched all of his movies and knows all of his songs by heart. It's Ernesto that has inspired Miguel to become a musician.

Unfortunately for Miguel his family has a hate for music in general. They're family has been generations into cobbling. That's the family business and they basically want Miguel to follow in the family business. Of course Miguel wants to pursue music instead of making shoes so his hopes are to win a talent contest at a big festival. The festival so happens to lie on the day his cultural background celebrates the dead.

Miguel catches wind of his plans to enter the contest and destroys his guitar. Eager as Miguel is, this doesn't stop him. After a series of assumptions from the images of his historic family shrine he deducts that Ernesto is in fact his great grandfather. This basically furthers his ambitions in winning the contest but he needs a guitar to be able to enter.

Miguel has the daring idea to break into Ernesto's crypt and steal his guitar to play at the festival. Just when he gets his hands on Ernesto's guitar he finds himself in the afterworld. He's committed a serious crime that has gotten himself cursed.

The only way for him to get back into the land of the living is for him to get an ancestor in the land of the dead to give him blessings. This should be easy enough but his great grandmother is adamantly against music. She will give Miguel her blessing to go back to the land of the living if he promises to refrain from music. Of course Miguel refuses and decides since he's in the land of the dead he is able to find his great grandfather Ernesto give him his blessing.

That's where the movie pretty much sets off. There are a number of layers to this movie that you have to peel away but it's so smartly made that everything makes sense. I love that they talk about the drive to do what you want and what those limits should be. We often talk about going after what you want in life but we rarely say take a step back and recognize the decisions you're making. Sometimes the decisions that you have to make can hurt a lot of people and it's just not worth it. Blinded by our ambitions we don't really see this all the time.

They also talk about the power of acceptance in our own family. Sometimes grudges aren't worth keeping. Our personal grudges sometimes have an affect on others in the family. We have to be more cognizant of the circumstances of our negativity. Everything is a chain reaction and we all have an affect on each other. In the case of this movie we see behavior handed down by generations and in the end it hurts Miguel. Something that really shouldn't be affecting Miguel has been taught for generations. Now he's suffering from it and he doesn't really know why.

Still to this day the art direction and visuals of this movie are absolutely stunning. Everything is done so beautifully you can watch it and just get mesmerized as the music in the background has you in a trance. I love that there is so much cultural significance to all of the art and the music in this movie.

It's really interesting how Mexican culture has so many similarities to Chinese culture in terms of the dead. The fact that they put the images of the dead as a shrine in the household had me intrigued because my Chinese culture does that too. It's all for the same reasons as well. We make offerings to the land of the dead just as in Mexican culture. There are a number of similarities that I was astonished with. It just made the whole movie that much more relatable for me.

Overall, I found this movie to be one of the best movies I've ever seen that deals with family. The ideas of family acceptance and decision making having ripple effects through the people around you is just engrossing. I loved this movie and it will probably forever a rotational movie for me. I have to give this movie a 10 out of 10. This movie will continually be recommended by me and it is easily one of my favorite movies.