It was, to say the least, challenging to get The Flower to see the latest “Pixar” movie (scare quotes explained in a bit). Cars 2 was really quite a blow for a little girl (at the time) who idolized Pixar and their perfect record of moviemaking. When Cars 3 came out, she just ignored it, and she was prepared to do the same with Coco. We did finally drag her to it, though, with her little sister in tow and she found it…acceptable: “It was pretty good.” (Do not read that with too much emphasis on the “good”. Or the “pretty” for that matter.)

It’ll have to do, kid.

I would probably place it in my top 5 (and certainly my top 10) for 2017, keeping in mind that most of the movies we saw last year were not actually from 2017 and I don’t think we missed much, frankly.

Coco at least has the most heart-wrenching scene of 2017, during which the Barbarienne—who places this as possibly her favorite movie, naturally—was literally racked with sobs. There was a lot of sniffling in the house, and even I had a picturesque single tear roll down my cheek. So, all five of us (The Boy and His Girl were there) gave this a thumbs up, with varying degrees of “up”ness.

Reasonable interpretation of the Barbarienne “racked with sobs”.

The story is that a young Mexican boy is descended from a family of shoemakers. His great great grandmother was deserted by her no-good musician husband, and started making shoes to keep herself and her young daughter alive. So, while the family is successful, they are also the only non-musical family in Mexico (per the story). The problem of course is that our hero, Miguel, does not love the zapatos and does love the music. He also loves his great grandmother, the somewhat addled old woman who doesn’t much remember people but pines for the father that abandoned her.

Mayhem ensues when Miguel, on his way to compete in the town talent show, hides his guitar under the family shrine. The family shrine has pictures of all the deceased members of the family, with a candle lit for Dia De Los Muertos, the only holiday the Mexicans have, apparently. He knocks his great-great grandmother’s picture off the top and discovers that the decapitated man (the missing great-great grandfather whose head has been ripped off to erase him from memory) is holding a distinctive guitar exactly like that wielded by the greatest musician of all time: Ernesto de la Cruz.

Excited by this information, he confronts his families with his dreams and in a fit of pique, his grandmother destroys his guitar.

The distraught Miguel runs into town and realizes he can still compete if he gets a replacement guitar. And his (presumed) great-great grandfather’s guitar is in the big crypt at the center of the festivities. Since de la Cruz’ motto was “seize the moment”, Miguel has only mild trepidation about stealing his guitar (miraculously still strung and in tune) for his own purposes.

Stealing from the dead on Dia De Los Muertos, unfortunately, earns you a one way trip to the land of the dead. And if Miguel wants back, he’s going to have to get a blessing from his decidedly music-hostile and dead family. Along the way he picks up a down-in-the-mouth skeleton pal who is rapidly fading due to the last person on earth forgetting him, and discovers the town mutt (he calls “Dante”) easily crosses into the world of the dead.

Land of the Dead, Pixar Style.

This movie is jam-packed, yet both The Boy and The Flower decided there was something not very Pixar-ish about it. It was more a Disney film, they thought. Indeed, since John Lasseter’s migration to head of Disney Animation, the two studios have become more and more alike. The Good Dinosaur, for example, felt very, very Disney. Zootopia felt very Pixar. The Boy was coming up with ideas as to why, which I was shooting down—like, he proposed Pixar villains were different from Disney villains, but I pointed out Hopper (A Bug’s Life), Syndrome (The Incredibles) and Lotso (Toy Story 3)—though without disagreeing with him.

He finally did nail it: This is a princess movie. Miguel is, basically, the ’90s-era Disney princess looking to find himself and reconcile that (if possible) with family. Much like Zootopia is more Pixar-like, because it’s about the individual’s relationship with their group, and is less about “finding one’s self and forcing others to see how awesome they are” than “trying to figure out how to reconcile self and group”.

There is something, too, about Pixar being, now, a 20-year-old established company: It lacks the energy it had 10 years ago. This is all very polished. It had a weird, weird segment up front talking about how many people go into making a movie like this which, if nothing else, constituted a minor spoiler about the land of the dead. Technical, the film is meticulous, as one expects from Pixar. But aesthetically? A (Mexican) friend of mine said The Book of Life—a three year old movie!—looked better than this, and she is not wrong. Life is a mediocre story with a balls-out unapologetically beautiful presentation by “Reel FX Creative Studios”. Who? You know, the guys who may eventually do The Book of Life 2.

Land of the Dead, Reel FX style.

The vaunted city of the dead, discussed at the front of the film, is ridiculously detailed, no doubt, and pretty, but also wrapped in some kind of miasma. The town looks like one of the rundown places outside of Tijuana, though without the obeisance to the laws of physics, but it also seems to be shrouded with dust and smog like those places often seem to be—so you don’t really get to see it. You don’t get a sense of wonder that you get, for example, when Marlon finds himself in the open ocean and that’s just a plain blue field! (Not really, of course: There are lighting patterns and motes, but it’s very minimal and very effective.)

Here you have all the detail in the world and the talent to populate it, and…not so much. The Boy also noticed that the peripheral characters seemed less strong, when even the most minor characters in classic Pixar tend to stand out (like the walking binoculars in Toy Story).

Now look, this is good, as I said, and it’ll rip your heart out in classic Pixar fashion, but it’s definitely not the same. And when, like The Boy and The Flower, you’ve grown up with Pixar, these are things you notice.

The cast of mostly forgettable dead characters.