Pixar’s Coco is sweet, visually stunning, and much too predictable

Pixar’s latest film, Coco, may be the studio’s most visually beautiful offering to date. Set mostly in the Land of the Dead, it’s colorful, imaginative, eye-popping — a visual feast with a lot of heart. Set in Mexico and featuring an all-Latinx voice cast, it is in many ways fresh, innovative, and laudable.

But what always set Pixar apart from other animation studios was its ability to turn out films that seemed truly original in every way — not just visually, and not just in their characters, but in the stories themselves. You could always expect unexpected wisdom from a Pixar film, some unforgettable sequence or insight about love (as in Up’s prelude) or fear (Monsters, Inc.) or family (The Incredibles) or growing up (the Toy Story series). Where other animation studios aimed to delight their adult audience segment by slinging wry jokes aimed at parents in the midst of boilerplate kid-movie antics, Pixar made its reputation by aiming for the heart, with observations about life that felt real and hard-won.

There’s some of that in Coco, to be sure — but it’s hard to shake the feeling that Pixar is falling into the kind of rut it once so deftly avoided. And so while Coco is undoubtedly one of 2017’s best family-oriented animated films, and a heartwarming and beautiful one as well, it’s unfortunate that the movie’s biggest insight is that Pixar’s golden age of storytelling may be behind it.

Pixar found itself in hot water a few years ago when news emerged that it was trying to copyright the phrase “Dia de los Muertos.” In English, that’s the Day of the Dead, a holiday most closely associated with Mexican culture, in which families remember their departed ancestors. The trademark request drew swift critique, especially from the Latinx community, many of whom feared that Disney was seeking to turn a treasured cultural tradition into profit. A Change.org petition stating that “our spiritual traditions are for everyone, not for companies like Walt Disney to trademark and exploit,” garnered more than 21,000 signatures.

In light of this criticism, and in an attempt to make sure the end product would be respectful of the Mexican culture it was evoking, Pixar created a group of cultural consultants who advised on the film, including Chicano artist Lalo Alcaraz, playwright Octavio Solís, and Camino Arts’ Marcela Davison Aviles; Pixar storyboard artist Adrian Molina, who is of Mexican descent, co-directed and wrote the script. Given its broad built-in younger audience for whom subtitles are not a viable option, Coco is still in English, but the rest of it is an imaginative take on a Mexican holiday through the lens of its culture.

Coco’s protagonist is Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez), a budding young musician whose family is the only one in their fictional town that’s dead set against music. There’s a reason: Miguel’s great-great-grandmother was abandoned by her husband, a musician, while her daughter — Miguel’s Mamá Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguía) — was still young, and from then on all music was forbidden in the family’s household.

Mamá Coco is old now, and fading fast. She lives with her daughter, Miguel’s fierce abuelita (Renee Victor), and Miguel’s parents and siblings. Miguel, meanwhile, has been sneaking around learning to play a guitar he’s refurbished, and his idol is the “greatest musician of all time,” Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), whose statue stands in the town square.

In preparation for Dia de los Muertos, Miguel’s family has set up the pictures of various dead relatives in the house and are preparing for the night’s visitation. (In the film’s version of the holiday, the dead are granted a pass to visit their families that night, though the living can’t see the dead.) Miguel wants to slip away from the family’s festivities and play in the town’s holiday talent show that night, but Abuelita is firmly against it, and smashes Miguel’s guitar. In desperation, he runs away and tries to steal de la Cruz’s guitar from where it rests in his tomb, and then plays a few chords — but by so doing, he inadvertently slips into the realm of the dead, where the living can no longer see him.

Suddenly, Miguel can see all of the town’s ancestors (rendered as colorful, friendly skeletons) as they enter the land of the living, visiting graves and enjoying looking at their still-living relatives. His own skeletal ancestors spot him, realize what’s happened, and smuggle him into the Land of the Dead in an attempt to fix the situation. There he begins the hunt for de la Cruz, who he’s pretty sure is also the great-great-grandfather who abandoned Mamá Coco’s mother. Can connecting with family help him return to the land of the living before it’s too late?

The story spirals out from there, and it’s often very fun, especially because it’s filled with music and song-and-dance numbers and a lot of skeleton humor (though none of it is macabre). In Coco, the Land of the Dead is less like a final resting place and more like a big party where you get to stay as long as the living remember you.

But when you’re forgotten by the living, you fade to dust and slip away for good. That’s a poignant concept and a bit of a scary one, but it serves as a good central idea for the film: that destroying memories, even the painful ones, has long-lasting consequences for future generations. So remembering is good, even when it’s not all happy.

There’s some affinity here with the affirmation of sadness in Pixar’s Inside Out, but Coco doesn’t dwell on it all that long. And so the point that Coco advances — that remembering the past is important — leans dangerously into the realm of becoming just “the lesson” that all kids’ films seem to have to have, without any of the added unexpected insight or emotional nuance aimed at the adults in the room that defines the studio’s best work.

Exacerbating that sense is the fact that the arcs and twists in Coco are surprisingly familiar and predictable. Oh, does Miguel feel like an outsider even in his own family? Maybe he’ll find out he’s not such an outsider by the end. Oh, is Miguel looking for his great-great-grandfather? Maybe that won’t end as he’s always dreamed it would. Oh, is there a broken romance at the heart of the story? What are the chances it will be mended by the end? The expected nature of these beats makes the film less surprising, and thus makes the story less engaging — and that leaves less room for its final emotional beats to hit home.

The predictability is a shame, because everything else about Coco is exciting, and Pixar’s foray into telling a story that faithfully draws on a culture shared by a wide swath of its audience is laudable.

But while Coco brings a lot of sweetness and light with it (and, undoubtedly, a lot of happy tears), not one story beat includes something to startle the adults in the audience into realizing something new. No movie has to do that. But Pixar once was reliably in the business of making indelible cinematic crowd pleasers — and now it feels like it’s settling into something much more routine.

Coco opens in theaters on November 22, 2017.