Coco (PG)
Council of Geeks; Disney Movies; Disney Wiki; IMDb; Pixar; Pixar Wiki; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This came out in 2017, but I didn't see it until 2019. My plan was to watch it on November 2 (The Day of the Dead), but alas, I didn't get around to it until November 10. And then I didn't get around to writing this review until November 17. Sigh. But it was an awesome movie.

It's about a 12-year-old boy named Miguel, who lives in Santa Cecilia, Mexico. For the past few generations, his whole family has avoided music like the plague, because Miguel's great great grandfather was a musician who had left town with a dream of sharing his music with the world, and never returned. So, he left his wife, Imelda, to raise their young daughter, Coco, alone. And ever since then, the family has blamed music for this. Now, of course, Coco is an old woman, Miguel's great grandmother. Anyway, Coco secretly plays guitar and sings, and wants to enter the upcoming music competition at the Day of the Dead festival in town, but his grandmother finds out, and smashes his guitar. And, um, I forget now whether it was before or after that, but something led Miguel to believe his great great grandfather had been the musical movie star he idolizes, Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), who had come from Santa Cecilia, himself. So he is entombed in a mausoleum there, full of stuff from his career, including his guitar. On the night of the festival, Miguel breaks into the mausoleum to "borrow" the guitar, so that he can enter the competition.

However, he soon finds that he's become invisible and immaterial, like the ghosts of the town's ancestors who show up to visit their living relatives. Of course, the living don't see or hear the ghosts... but now Miguel does. And his dead relatives agree to take Miguel to the Land of the Dead, to meet his great great grandmother, Imelda (Alanna Ubach), who had been unable to cross over the bridge of flowers to enter the land of the living this year, since Miguel had broken the picture frame that held her photograph. (Actually, at this point the dead relatives had no idea that had happened, so they didn't understand what was preventing her from crossing over. It's interesting to me that for the dead to visit the living, the living must put their picture among the offerings- ofrenda- they leave out for them on the Day of the Dead. I mean, what did they do before photography was invented? Maybe the very rich had paintings of themselves, but otherwise I would assume the dead simply couldn't visit the living at all. So that was a plot point that didn't make sense to me, but I'm willing to overlook it. It's also interesting that there are computers in the Land of the Dead, with programs that can tell whether or not an individual spirit's family has put their picture in the ofrenda.) Anyway, Miguel has to receive the blessing of a family member to return to normal, and if that doesn't happen by sunrise, he'll be dead for real, I guess. Imelda is eager to give him her blessing, so he can restore her picture and she can visit the family, but her blessing is conditional on Miguel's giving up music, which he's unwilling to do. So he seeks out Ernest, instead. And he receives help from another dead guy he meets, named Héctor (Gael García Bernal), who is also a musician. And Héctor wants Miguel to take his own photo back to the Land of the living, so that his daughter won't forget him. Because when there's no one left among the living who remembers a dead person (and who knew that person in life), that person disappears completely. (No one in the Land of the Dead actually knows what happens to them when they disappear, but the idea of "death for the dead" reminded me of the "lost souls room" from Beetlejuice.) And Héctor's daughter, who is now very old, is the last living person who remembers him, and she's starting to forget. So of course he doesn't want that.

Well, a lot more happens, which I don't want to spoil. There are some major plot twists, the most important of which I thought was entirely predictable. But even once the reveal came, there was plenty more action and drama in the film. And ultimately a happy ending. And I thought it was all very touching and beautiful, and I don't know what else to tell you.

For a limited time, the movie was accompanied theatrically by the Disney short Olaf's Frozen Adventure. There's also a Pixar short called Dante's Lunch about Miguel's dog, Dante, which was released online several months before "Coco" opened in theaters, but I didn't see it until the day I wrote this review. (It's strange I forgot to even mention Dante in my review of "Coco," because he's kind of important, but then again... I don't really want to spoil anything about him. I will say I think the name "Dante" is entirely apt for a movie about a trip to the Land of the Dead, though.)