# Coco Is Among Pixar's Best Movies in Years

Full of wit, music, and color, this Día de Muertos–themed tribute to family marks a return to form for the studio.

## Most Popular

1. ### Nazis Are Just Like You and Me, Except They're Nazis

   - James Hamblin
   - Nov 25, 2017

2. ### The Making of an American Nazi

   - Luke O’Brien
   - Nov 14, 2017

3. ### The Nationalist's Delusion

   - Adam Serwer
   - Nov 20, 2017

4. ### Donald Trump’s Obsession with Time Magazine Makes Almost Too Much Sense

   - Adrienne LaFrance
   - 7:00 AM ET

5. ### Females' Eggs May Actively Select Certain Sperm

   - Carrie Arnold
   - Nov 25, 2017

- Christopher Orr
- Nov 24, 2017
- Culture

- Share
- Tweet
Text Size

Well, that’s more like it. As someone who has written at some length about the decline of Pixar Studios since its acquisition by Disney, I am especially pleased to be proven wrong, even if only intermittently. The studio’s latest release, Coco, is one such occasion.

Though Pixar has never acknowledged as much publicly, its cinematic philosophy (and business model) has shifted notably: Where the studio once aspired to excellence with every single picture—Pixar President Ed Catmull wrote an entire book expressing this ideal, Creativity Inc.—it now seems content to roll out a few profitable, hyper-merchandise-friendly sequels for every genuinely original feature it unveils. (To put it another way, the studio has shifted away from “creativity” and toward “inc.”)

#### Related Story

How Pixar Lost Its Way

But if Finding Dory and Cars 3 are the price we must pay for a film such as Coco, then so be it. Pixar’s latest is up there with Inside Out among the studio’s best features in years—less complex than Pete Docter’s 2015 film, but perhaps a tad more emotionally resonant.

Miguel Rivera (Anthony Gonzalez) is a 12-year-old boy in Mexico whose greatest desire in life is to be a musician like his idol, the mid-century legend Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). Alas, Miguel’s great-great-grandmother was abandoned by her musician husband, and the Rivera family has enforced an iron-clad policy against music ever since. Instead, each subsequent generation has gone into the family business of making shoes. (Shades of Hermey, the toy-making elf who wished to become a dentist.)

But could it be that de la Cruz was in fact Miguel’s long since written-off great-great-grandfather? That certainly appears to be the case. So in order to participate in a music competition on Día de Muertos, Miguel “borrows” de la Cruz’s famous guitar, his own having been smashed earlier in the day by his grandmother. But with the very first strum, Miguel is transported to the Land of the Dead. There, he meets departed members of his own family and ultimately, with the help of a trickster named Héctor (Gael García Bernal), de la Cruz himself.

Directed by longtime Pixarian Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3), the tale that unfolds from these beginnings is not terribly innovative (less so, for instance, than 2014’s similarly themed though less well-realized The Book of Life). But it is a tale told with considerable wit—this is one of Pixar’s funniest films—and genuine tenderness. There are a few nice twists and reversals along the way. And while the movie’s conclusion is not difficult to see coming, anyone whose heart is not warmed by it may wish to consult with an cardio-therapist.

But where Coco shines most brightly—literally—is in its vibrant visuals.

Befitting its subject, this is the most musical feature yet produced by Pixar, with songs co-written by Robert Lopez, of The Book of Mormon, Avenue Q, and Frozen fame. There are clever pop-cultural nuggets scattered throughout: a Mac Plus that is condemned as a “devil box” and smashed with a shoe; a gatehouse between the lands of the living and the dead that bears a distinct resemblance to the entrance to Disneyland; a hilariously avant-garde stage show put on by a deceased Frida Kahlo.

But where Coco shines most brightly—literally—is in its vibrant visuals, which rely on a palette of fluorescent greens, blues, yellows, and oranges. In this telling, the Land of the Dead is not a fearsome place, but rather a never-ending skeleton party conducted in a glorious multi-tiered city that rises from sea-level houseboats to vast, imperious towers inhabited by celebrities such as de la Cruz—all of them connected by arched bridges and aerial trams.

Does Coco rise to the heights of Pixar’s very best work? No. But it is a generous, heartfelt film, full of color and music, one that offers a timely Thanksgiving tribute to the intergenerational importance of family. Its very title lovingly derives from the name of Miguel’s oldest living relative, great-grandmother Mamá Coco, whose importance to the story only becomes clear late in the film.

I wish the movie suggested that all was now well with Pixar, but warning signs are, if anything, multiplying. The studio’s next two films will be sequels, The Incredibles 2 and an utterly heretical “franchise reboot,” Toy Story 4. With Coco, even the customary delight of a Pixar short before the movie is missing: In its place is “Olaf’s Frozen Adventure,” which whatever its quality (it did not screen for critics) suggests that the studio is being ever-more subsumed into its Disney parent. And the interlocking news stories that Pixar guru John Lasseter is going on leave due to alleged inappropriate behavior and that Rashida Jones left Toy Story 4 over issues of diversity are depressing on almost every level imaginable.

But those are issues to be addressed in the days to come. In the meantime, my advice is to round up the family, take them to Coco, and together give thanks.

- Share
- Tweet
- Comments

## Latest Video

## Myths You Learned in Health Class

American schools have a long history of teaching students misinformation in health class.

- Alice Roth
- Nov 21, 2017

## About the Author

- Christopher Orr is a senior editor and the principal film critic at The Atlantic. He has written on movies for the New Republic, LA Weekly, Salon, and The New York Sun, and has worked as an editor for numerous publications.
  - Twitter

## Most Popular

Presented by

- AP

  ### Nazis Are Just Like You and Me, Except They're Nazis

  - James Hamblin

  Despite what you may have read in The New York Times

  ELKO, Nevada—“The water is almost ready,” he said, bending down to look for the little bubbles. “Once you see the bubbles rising to the surface, you know the water is hot enough to cook the pasta.”

  Steve Stevenson dispenses wisdom freely, though he is not a chef. He is 32 years old, and he drinks whole milk, and his tattoos are nonviolent. The kitchen spice rack contains only garlic powder. He wears jeans made of denim. The t-shirt on his back has a tag sticking out, and I read it as he leans in to eye the pot of water: “100 percent cotton.”

  “What can I say,” jokes Stevenson, as he sees me taking note of the spice rack. “I like garlic powder.”

  We both chuckle. The shimmering evening sun glints off the porcelain saltshaker and casts a long shadow onto the linoleum. As I follow its path, his wife Stephanie appears in the kitchen doorway, an exasperated look on her face.

  Continue Reading
- Tom Dilly Littleson

  ### The Making of an American Nazi

  - Luke O’Brien

  How did Andrew Anglin go from being an antiracist vegan to the alt-right’s most vicious troll and propagandist—and how might he be stopped?

  On December 16, 2016, Tanya Gersh answered her phone and heard gunshots. Startled, she hung up. Gersh, a real-estate agent who lives in Whitefish, Montana, assumed it was a prank call. But the phone rang again. More gunshots. Again, she hung up. Another call. This time, she heard a man’s voice: “This is how we can keep the Holocaust alive,” he said. “We can bury you without touching you.”

  When Gersh put down the phone, her hands were shaking. She was one of only about 100 Jews in Whitefish and the surrounding Flathead Valley, and she knew there were white nationalists and “sovereign citizens” in the area. But Gersh had lived in Whitefish for more than 20 years, since just after college, and had always considered the scenic ski town an idyllic place. She didn’t even have a key to her house—she’d never felt the need to lock her door. Now that sense of security was about to be shattered.

  Continue Reading
- Chris Kindred / The Atlantic

  ### The Nationalist's Delusion

  - Adam Serwer

  Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination.

  THIRTY YEARS AGO, nearly half of Louisiana voted for a Klansman, and the media struggled to explain why.

  It was 1990 and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, astonished political observers when he came within striking distance of defeating incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston, earning 43 percent of the vote. If Johnston’s Republican rival hadn’t dropped out of the race and endorsed him at the last minute, the outcome might have been different.

  Was it economic anxiety? The Washington Post reported that the state had “a large working class that has suffered through a long recession.” Was it a blow against the state’s hated political establishment? An editorial from United Press International explained, “Louisianans showed the nation by voting for Duke that they were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Was it anti-Washington rage? A Loyola University pollster argued, “There were the voters who liked Duke, those who hated J. Bennett Johnston, and those who just wanted to send a message to Washington.”

  Continue Reading
- Mike Blake / Reuters

  ### Donald Trump’s Obsession with Time Magazine Makes Almost Too Much Sense

  - Adrienne LaFrance

  The now-fading publication evokes a distinct 20th-century kind of wealth and influence—like the Plaza Hotel and Elaine’s on the Upper East Side.

  If you had to pick the year Time magazine’s “person of the year” jumped the shark, you’d probably start with 2006. That was when Time looked at the rise of open-publishing platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook, and decided the most influential person was the collective “you.” It was cheesy, trite, and had the exact effect Time wanted: everybody talked about it.

  Time’s annual “person of the year” designation has always been a gimmick, going all the way back to Charles Lindbergh in 1927. Time was once a scrappy upstart, but for decades it was a very serious must-read magazine. Now that the heyday of newsmagazines has receded, the spectrum of people who have ever held a physical copy of Time in their hands has shriveled. Yet the “person of the year” still creates a residual media buzz—attention that, as my colleague David Graham wrote in 2012, really isn’t justified. “Year-end wrap-ups,” he wrote, “simply aren’t news.”

  Continue Reading
- Allison Filice / Quanta Magazine

  ### Females' Eggs May Actively Select Certain Sperm

  - Carrie Arnold

  New evidence challenges the oldest law of genetics.

  In the winner-takes-all game of fertilization, millions of sperm race toward the egg that’s waiting at the finish line. Plenty of sperm don’t even make it off the starting line, thanks to missing or deformed tails and other defects. Still others lack the energy to finish the long journey through the female reproductive tract, or they get snared in sticky fluid meant to impede all but the strongest swimmers. For the subset of a subset of spermatozoa that reach their trophy, the final winner would be determined by one last sprint to the end. The exact identity of the sperm was random, and the egg waited passively until the Michael Phelps of gametes finally arrived. Or so scientists have thought.

  Continue Reading
- AP

  ### Herbert Hoover Is the Model Republicans Need

  - David Frum

  The latest biography of the “father of new conservatism” finally conveys the full range of his accomplishments.

  Never has the United States elected a more accomplished man to the presidency than Herbert Clark Hoover, whose organizational genius saved millions of lives from famine and destitution. Never has the ensuing presidency been marked by worse disasters.

  That paradox has energized every biographer of Hoover, from William Leuchtenberg’s brilliant brief study to the massive six-volume collective effort headed by George Nash (which I must confess from the start to having “read in,” but never to have actually “read”).

  The paradox again energizes the latest of the biographies, by Kenneth Whyte, released last month. (I should mention here that Whyte was the founding editor of a newspaper to which I contributed a column between 1998 and 2013.)

  Continue Reading
- Roadside Attractions

  ### Will a U.S. Adaptation Ruin Sebastian Lelio’s Gloria?

  - Tal Abbady

  The Chilean director’s 2013 drama is perhaps the best recent portrayal of female aging—one that American filmmakers could stand to learn from.

  When asked about the field research he conducted for his film Gloria, the Chilean director Sebastian Lelio described going out with his mother and her friends. “When I have a drink with them,” Lelio told the magazine Cromos in 2014, “I see things from their side because they’re living something so fierce: a cruel process of disappearance, of becoming invisible in a society in which beauty is understood as an obsession with youth.” Despite his choice of words, the 43-year-old director—who is now working on adapting a version of the 2013 drama for American audiences—didn’t actually make a movie that dismisses women beyond their child-bearing years as “disappearing.”

  Gloria doesn’t insist on an essential tragicomic sadness in female aging like so many films do. The story’s eponymous hero is 58 and long divorced, checking in at an office job by day, and working Santiago’s swank club-circuit for mature singles by night. Played by a radiant Paulina García, Gloria doesn’t explicitly reject her modest place in Chile’s free-market, so-called “miracle” economy. Instead, she seeks alternative fates on the dance floor, in the narcotic power of Lite FM nostalgia radio and in the companionship of a retired naval officer named Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez). Mostly, though, even with the specter of abandonment and blindness (she gets a glaucoma diagnosis at one point), Gloria luxuriates in her own selfhood. She’s empathic and open and essentially untethered to the stultifying dramas that confine the lives of those around her, including Rodolfo and her grown children.

  Continue Reading
- Charles Gullung

  ### My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

  - Karl Taro Greenfeld

  What happens when a father, alarmed by his 13-year-old daughter's nightly workload, tries to do her homework for a week

  Memorization, not rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.

  Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and everyone—students, teachers, schools—is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.

  Continue Reading
- Richard Baker / Getty

  ### Dog Poo, an Environmental Tragedy

  - T. Hugh Crawford

  When industrial fertilizer replaced dung heaps, its spoils helped fund the spread of plastics. An Object Lesson.

  In 1915, William Carlos Williams published a poem about dog waste. When industrial fertilizer replaced dung heaps, its spoils helped fund the spread of plastics. “Pastoral” shuns rural landscape in favor of a city scene, with an old man walking in the gutter. In Williams’s assessment, the man “gathering dog lime”—a euphemistic name for dog dung—does work “more majestic than / That of the episcopal minister.”

  A 21st-century reader would likely find the man’s action unremarkable. Today, dog feces are understood to have dangerous levels of E. Coli and salmonella, not to mention untold parasites. Therefore, they must be tucked away in plastic bags and deposited at the nearest poop station. Williams’s old man is significant for his dignity but not his occupation.

  Continue Reading
- Rick Wilking / Reuters

  ### What's Dangerous About Donald Trump's Foreign Policy?

  - Uri Friedman

  His unorthodox approach has frightened some observers. But it’s his more conventional moves that have cost the most lives.

  When critics argue that Donald Trump is an exceptionally reckless commander in chief, they tend to highlight how the American president deviates from the norm.

  By issuing “diplomatic pronouncements” on Twitter and pronouncing actual diplomats irrelevant, Hillary Clinton says, Trump poses “a clear and present danger to our country and to the world.” Trump, the Republican Senator Bob Corker warns, acts “like he’s on a reality show” and “doesn’t realize that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making” about foreign policy, which should be left “to the professionals.” “We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear-weapons strike [against North Korea] that is wildly out of step with U.S. national-security interests,” Corker’s Democratic colleague Chris Murphy recently cautioned during a Senate hearing. In the same hearing, a former Defense Department official testified that he “would be very worried about a miscalculation based on the continuing use of [Trump’s] Twitter account with regard to North Korea.”

  Continue Reading

- ### Myths You Learned in Health Class

  - Alice Roth

  American schools have a long history of teaching students misinformation in health class.

  Watch Video

- ### We've Reached the End of White Christian America

  - Daniel Lombroso and Caitlin Cadieux

  The decline of a once-powerful majority is going to have profound implications.

  Watch Video

- ### Why the White, Working Class Voted for Trump

  - Tynesha Foreman and Nicolas Pollock

  New data and analysis from PRRI and The Atlantic suggests that it was cultural anxiety more than economic distress that fueled white, working-class support for Trump.

  Watch Video

More Popular Stories
Show Comments
Skip to article in Skip Ad >