This Is What Latino Film Critics Are Saying About Pixar’s ‘Coco’ | Hacker News Reader

This Is What Latino Film Critics Are Saying About Pixar’s ‘Coco’

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2 pointssohkamyung5 comments

Apart from the fun plot-line, the cultural awareness, and the entertainment value -- the animation work is great (skeletons don't walk like live humans, for instance).

[spoilers]

I would not say it's our favorite Pixar movie. My two-year old was fascinated (her first movie theater experience). My eight-year old was shaken by Frozen and by Inside Out, no this movie. It felt a bit derivative from Spirited Away in theme and format, but less transporting. I think Miguel should have been a bit older so he could have a love interest and feel conflicted about returning to the land of the living; maybe Pixar is already too Disney-fied.

Regarding your proposed plot change, I believe it doesn't fit with the meaning of what Dia de Muertos, the holiday, is about.

There was an an interview where director, Lee Unkrich, describes how there was a plot change during development:

"My initial approach was to tell a story about an American kid with a Mexican mother and an American father. And a story about him going down to Mexico for Dia de Muertos to experience the holiday and it ultimately was a story about a kid dealing with grief and learning to let go of somebody he had lost who he loved. And we put a lot of work into it. We didn’t, we never went up on reels with it, but we had a whole script and we had done a lot of development art. But we just kind of, we realized one day that we were telling a story that thematically was antithetical to what Dia de Muertos is all about. We were telling a story about letting go. And Dia de Muertos is about never letting go. It’s about this obligation to remember our loved ones and pass their stories along. And so we kind of scraped the whole thing down one day and started over. And at that point we had spent so much time in Mexico and had been so immersed in this world that we finally felt comfortable I guess in a way that maybe we didn’t at the beginning of the process to tell a story that was actually set in Mexico about a Mexican family."

The description of Día de Muertos on Wikipedia is all about family. ("The multi-day holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died, and help support their spiritual journey.")

If there were a romantic love interest as you suggest, then I believe the result would be more like the worry of the first reviewer, "made by and for Anglos", and "fail at capturing what it is that makes this Mexican holiday so special".

Thanks, that makes sense, the family is the center of love. Good background and perspective. I still think for the sake of storytelling there's a lot to be gained by the inclusion of romantic interests. There was just Hector. Look at wall-e and eve, the couple in Up, Ratatouille, Toy Story; most Pixar movies before they became part of Disney?

This is also the first Pixar film to be based on an existing, well-established theme.

I'm trying to imagine of an example of what that incongruity might feel like to someone of my Anglo background. The best I could come up with is a Christmas movie with a Romeo&Juliet love interest, where the two lead characters are dead by Christmas morning.

If I didn't know what Christmas was, other than "a large festival for family", then I might think it adds to the tragedy of the story. But, I argue, it's no longer a Christmas movie, but rather a movie which takes place on Christmas.

(Analogously, E.T. partially takes place on Halloween, but it is not a Halloween movie.)

Then to give a sense of "made by and for Anglos", think if this film were filmed in India, as a Bollywood-style musical, and where the two families were, say, stereotypical rich Texas oil families, rather like Bobby Ewing and Pamela Barnes from Dallas.

It's just some stupid film.

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