Didn’t see a thread about this one yet. I saw it today and I loved it. It’s become a very good contender for my favorite Pixar film (tied with “Inside Out.”) The visuals were gorgeous, the story was good (I even teared up a little at the end) and the characters were memorable. I don’t know enough about Mexican culture to comment on its accuracy, but I’ve ready several reviews saying the filmmakers actually made an effort to learn about the culture they were telling their story in.
I thought it was a nice touch that one of the previews for our showing was for a Spanish-language animated movie (“Condorito”).
I went through several tissues for most of the end and a few spots in the middle.
I don’t normally do 3D but I would say that it probably was worth the extra couple bucks. It’s not like 50s shlock where stuff is jumping out of the screen at you, but there were layers and depths that I’m sure 2d wouldn’t do justice if the artistry is important to you.
I thought it was an excellent movie. However, it’s the movie I’d least like to see a second time (and to be fair I never saw the second and third Cars, nor the dinosaur one. Just slipped past me). I’ve seen Toy Story a billion times. Ratatouille is one of my “always watch” when it’s on. But this was a little heavy for what I want from my “lighter” movies.
It’ll deserve all the awards it wins and probably many it won’t win, and I could understand an argument for it being the best pixar movie, but it won’t rank among my favorites because I like rewatchability.
I caught the Pizza Planet truck, saw the Pixar pinatas, but didn’t catch The Next Movie reference. I never get them all in the first go.
Condorito is in no way a children’s comic. Its funny, cynical, crazy sexist and it lampoons the culture. I’m not sure they can make a movie that will be true to the original source material.
I just got back from seeing it. The plot twists were pretty telegraphed, but that’s okay–I don’t go to a Pixar movie to be amazed by the Hitchcockian storytelling. I go for the visuals and for the sentimentality, and boy howdy did this movie deliver in bucketloads.
I always need a little time to settle with a movie before I can give a stable opinion, but right now this is feeling like one of their best movies yet.
I never saw The Book of Life but Coco is terrific.
The “short” before it is shit. And twenty fucking minutes long. Which made my kid squirmy by the time Coco ended, which sucks, because the ending of Coco is the best thing Pixar has done since the beginning of Up.
I’m going to have to re-watch the Book of Life to remember all the differences, but I think the big one is that Coco is about a kid, and Book of Life was about adults.
We saw Coco yesterday. It was very good. I would rank it in their top tier of movies, above A Bug’s Life and Inside Out, not as good as Wall-E and Monsters Inc. My husband’s family is latino. I think they really captured the essence of Mexican culture. Not the part where everyone goes around dressed in traditional clothing, but the family interactions and the spirit of it. There were moments that felt just like being with his family.
Oh god, yes. I was looking forward to something sweet and creative and charming, and instead got 20 goddamned minutes of Elsa and Anna and a wisecracking snowman, all to teach a heartwarming lesson about family. Coulda done without that for sure.
I loved the short, but I agree it was wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too long in this context. I’ll be great next year on Disney Channel as a half hour by itself, but not when you’re sitting there for another 90 minutes (and made the foolish mistake of drinking a giant coke beforehand).
I just got back from seeing this. Comparisons to Book of life are inevitable. The part that make me laugh was that Diego Luna voiced Book of Life and Gael Bernal Garcia voiced this movie (they are friends in real life and have worked together). Of the two, Pixar’s is more nuanced, but that is to be expected (by me anyway).
I liked a lot of the nods to famous Mexicans. Frida was a given, but Diego Rivera was also portrayed as was Cantinflas.
One thing I really liked a lot was that the majority of the accents were actually Mexican. As a Mexican-American, nothing ruins a movie/tv show more than when the role of a Mexican is given to a an actor that speaks with a Puerto Rican or Cuban accent. Imagine watching a western and the Sheriff is supposed to be a Texan but has a Cockney accent. Personally, I think I would have preferred the Spanish dubbed version.
Overall, I liked it. It’s a great step forward to not have over-the-top stereotypes typical in lots of movies. Now if only Hollywood would stop with the whole day of the dead with fiestas and sugar skulls = all of Mexico, that would be great too.
The short we got was Frozen. It was rather terrible.
If I’d gone in expecting a Frozen short, AND if I’d seen Frozen (somehow, as the daughter of two young girls, I’ve avoided this movie), AND if it was five minutes instead of 20-30 minutes, I wouldn’t have minded it so much. As it was, I started off disappointed and just got more and more irritated as it kept on going.
That’s too bad that you haven’t seen it. Frozen is overexposed, but a genuinely wonderful movie. The short was not great and most of the jokes assumed you had seen the original, so it was probably worse for you. I liked that they had a Jewish family in their town.
I loved Coco. It wasn’t what I was expecting going in, but it was fun and complex at the same time. I liked the visual world building they did for the land of the dead. The story wasn’t surprising so much as inevitable, but that’s ok because the suspense wasn’t the point and building that inevitability is no small task. I can’t speak too much for the cultural issues other than that it felt markedly different than many movies about Mexico that I have seen in the past.
I’m sure I’ll see it at some point, but I don’t watch enough movies to actively seek it out. Disney princess movies really don’t do it for me (nor, for that matter, do most stories of royalty, except ones where they die bloodily–looking at you Game of Thrones). So I’m sure it’s fine, but I’m not feeling the loss :).
I’m not a princess fan either, though I did like Frozen because it kind of messed with the trope (the heroes are a pair of sisters, neither of whom ends up married off at the end) but I don’t care for slapstick humor so Olaf the Snowman got old in a hurry. This short is mostly about Olaf, so there you go.
I’m sure a lot of little Frozen fans will probably want to go to Coco just to see the short, which kind of baffles me, but different strokes.
I think it would have been better to have a Mexican animated short, in Spanish (one that would be easy for non-Spanish-speakers to follow).
Saw it today with my 11-year-old son, whose friends, apparently, are mostly too cool to see a Pixar movie. Apparently it has not filtered down through the middle school set that this is not a kiddie movie. My son likes Pixar movies, though. We also saw Cars 3 together, and I wasn’t supposed to tell his friends.
Anyway, we got the Frozen short, and I could see him wondering if he’d made a mistake coming to the movie.
But then the feature came on, and we both loved it.
I was impressed that it had almost all Hispanic voice performers, even though no one would really know if it did not, other than, well, Hispanic people would probably respond more authentically to the material. I also liked that they just went ahead and used cultural terms and difficult to translate words without explaining them, trusting people to be able to figure them out from context.
The story was original enough that even when I knew some twist was coming, I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be. I knew, for example, that they weren’t going to send a message that it was coole for Ernesto to have left his family, that Hector was going to be more important than he seemed, and when it started to look like Ernesto was a terrible person, he was going to turn out not to be related to Miguel after all. I still didn’t know until right before they did it how they were going to pull it all together.
Also, I was sure the dog was going to die, and I was so glad he didn’t.
I didn’t cry, but I still recommend the movie quite highly.
It always bothers me in movies and TV shows where the performer is supposed to be playing a musical instrument, but it’s clear that they’re not. Indeed, it’s perfectly clear that they have no idea how to play an instrument and probably have no musical training whatsoever. This is not one of those movies.
The animators really did their homework for the musical performances, especially the guitar playing. It would not surprise me that they filmed the musicians in the studio as they were recording the songs. The chords, the strumming, the finger picking were spot on and perfectly synchronized to the music.
Plus all that was previously said about the rest of the movie itself.