Coco review – charmer that could

bring Pixar back from the dead

4/5stars4 out of 5 stars.
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 animation

Peter Bradshaw

@PeterBradshaw1
Thu 18 Jan 2018 12.00 GMTLast modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 19.29 GMT

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Living with the dead … Miguel and friends in Coco. Photograph: Allstar/Pixar/Disney

Being 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.