Guardian - 18 January 2018, 14:00 (+ 2295 days 5 hours and 10 minutes) Movies & TV
A boy who wants to become a musician against the wishes of his family ends up in the Land of the Dead in this engaging, spectacular animationBeing simultaneously life-affirming and death-obsessed is a tough act for any film to pull off, but Coco manages it. This might start bringing Pixar studios back from the dead. I’d feared the worst from this movie’s Mexican Day of the Dead trope, expecting a tiresome parade of sub-Halloweeny horror masks under a sombrero of cliches. Actually, it’s an engaging and touching quest narrative, with some great spectacle, sweet musical numbers and on-point stuff about the permeability of national borders.Coco is conceived on classic lines, certainly, but has that rarest of things in movies of any sort – a real third act and an interesting ending. It has something to say about memory and mortality and how we think about the awfully big adventure waiting for us all, which finally incubated an unexpectedly stubborn lump in my throat. This film has a potency that Pixar hasn’t had for a while, and for suppressed tears, the last five minutes of Coco might come to be compared to the opening montage of Up. Continue reading...