A Hidden Message in Coco?

When I was a kid, my parents took us to movies like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which I found to be painfully boring in my four year old mind. Whenever they broke into song, I broke into yawns. There was no Star Wars back then. If they did do an episode of that iconic sci-fi, it would be devoid of any actual action and most likely be a musical. You see, children's films in my youth were written for parents, not kids.



Today, animated film often interweaves humor for both generations like when Anna in Frozen says in response to Kristoff inquiring about Hans's foot size,



"Foot size doesn't matter."

When Dick Van Dyke started crooning in his northern British accent during a scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, I asked my father to take me to the loo which I found more interesting than the film. At four years old movies for me were as boring as church. It would be over a decade before the adolescent viewing audiences were rescued by the likes of Indiana Jones.

Recently, my wife and I decided to take our youngest, Willy, to the movies on a weekend when his older brother, Aidan, was away at drill for Sea Cadets. Christine often looks through reviews and critiques on Rotten Tomatoes to find a film. Before long she announced,



 

"Let's go see Coco. I can't find one bad review."

Without asking what the film was about, I agreed because, after all, as the family dad I'm the beta voice when it comes to what we do on the weekends.

Now, Coco is about a boy, named Miguel, who wants to be a musician, but his family, mostly spurned on by his grandmother, refuses to let him play music because his great-great grandfather split on his wife and daughter to go into the world and seek his fortune as a musician. The little girl, abandoned by her father, is Coco, Miguel's great grand mother, who is still alive even though she mostly sits in a wheelchair and squints as she is rolled from room to room in a semi catatonic state. It really blows to get old.

Miguel's family are shoemakers by trade owing to a successful small business started by his great-great grandmother after her husband ditches her and Coco for a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Miguel is expected to work in the family business like Jake Gyllenhaal was supposed to toil in the coal mines instead of being a rocket scientist in October Sky. Miguel wants to enter a talent contest with his makeshift, handmade guitar, but his grandmother smashes the instrument as she espouses the now familiar theme of "the importance of family." I was thinking more along the lines of "family sucks big time," but I kept that to myself.


Unable to procure an instrument, Miguel decides to raid a mausoleum of a famous musician who he discovers in a photo is his relative who chose music over providing for his wife and child in favor of money, fame and groupies. Miguel pilfers the guitar on the eve of the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday in which deceased ancestors are remembered by decorating headstones with photos and leaving food in the cemetery. Ratatouille must love this holiday. Magnolias are also used to adorn the shrines as they are the Flowers of the Dead. When Miguel touches a magnolia pedal, he suddenly can see all the dead people returning for the chow left by their living relatives. They aren't messed up zombies or confused dead people who terrorized Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. There was some attempt to make the corpses cute, but my six year old was having no part of it.

Now this is where this tale deviated from cultural appropriation to cultural aberration. In the movie there are no religious symbols or gestures with the exception of the grandmother making the sign of the cross once. When Miguel travels to the Land of the Dead, he discovers that his relative is not his idol, the famous singer Ernesto de la Cruz, but instead the song writer, Hector. In fact, Miguel learns that when Hector tried to return to his wife and his daughter, Ernesto killed him. The famed singer remains a popular performer in the Land of the Dead while his victim, Hector, is a down and out dredge. So much for Judgment Day. I thought Catholics believe Jesus sorts all that out when you take a dirt nap. Apparently not. In the Land of the Dead, according to Pixar, assholes remain assholes and losers remain losers.

 

 

The world of the living in Coco was replete with many cultural Mexican stereotypes as in Mariachi bands with colorful sombreros, spicy food, plenty of tequila, abundant clay pottery and embroidered garments. Even Miguel's young mother was working in the shoe factory while pregnant. For all the common Mexican cultural references present in the living world of Coco, the Land of the Dead was pure fantasy. Apart from the aforementioned screw job Hector encountered in the afterlife, the presence of colorful spirit animals was a little too reminiscent of Avatar. These creatures allowed Pixar animators to employ the extended color palate, making vibrant stokes of eye candy. Too bad the Catholic religion Mexicans follow here on earth is completely wrong. I guess that's okay because Catholics can sometimes be exclusive.

On the Day of the Dead, at the border crossing from the Land of the Dead to the world of the living, Hector is repeatedly rejected by the border officials because his relatives on earth don't display his picture nor remember him. This doesn't stop Hector from trying to jump the fence anyway. This would have been a great opportunity to make one of those famous Disney trademark quips for laughs. Like Hector could have said,

"You know, that wall is not that huge."

But they steered clear of any of that. In fact, Coco was devoid of any witty humor. In one scene when a lot of action was taking place on a stage, a skeleton returns to his seat with two corn dogs and asks,

"Did I miss anything?"

"Nothing," I thought.

I won't spoil the ending of Coco for you, but I would like to recap the moral of the story. Family comes first, even if they want you to quit school and forgo your dream in favor of free labor in the family business. It's absolutely imperative to have a photo of your dead relatives in your house, or they fade away in the afterlife. I wasn't aware that technology here on earth was so connected to the World of the Dead. There is no justice after you croak. Leaving your children and wife here on earth doesn’t matter as long as you are murdered, and you write lots of letters.

I read an online article in Vogue entitled, "Why Coco Just Might Be the Most Important Film of the Year" in which the author stated,

"...at a time when the president went on to declare his candidacy by branding Mexican immigrants 'rapists' who are 'bringing drugs' and 'bringing crime' to America, necessitating his passion project of a Mexican border wall, Coco’s success is nevertheless a powerful political statement."

Hollywood is run by influential people who can set an agenda through weapons of mass media manipulation, including what is known as an "Oscar campaign." The latter was employed extensively by Harvey Weinstein whose career totals include 341 nominations and 81 wins. Exactly what is an Oscar campaign? It's well documented that the Golden Globes are awarded at least partially by bribing the Hollywood Foreign Press, which consists of 90 individual who publish articles or pictures outside the USA at least four times each year. In Hollywood, nothing of value is given away for free. Success in Tinseltown is all about clout management, that is, being perceived as the go to person for the next big project. A good publicist is a master media manipulator. There is no shortage of mutual hate between President Trump and the media, but that conflict shouldn't taint the truth less we succumb to abject propaganda.

Some may describe Coco as an "important" film, but in the end the movie has less character development than an Aesop fable, lacks any trademark Disney humor, and follows a tired theme of family and tradition all while ignoring the parts of a culture that don't fit the socially relevant message.