Dia de los Muertos [The Day of the Dead] has begun to permeate pop-culture, featured prominently now in both Bond (Spectre) and animated children’s films (The Book of Life). Per tradition, during the Mexican Holiday, the dead journey from the afterlife to the land of the living. To celebrate – families set up altars, vigils, & parades all to honor loved ones lost. It’s a bright, bold, festive event – so it’s no surprise it caught the attention of filmmaker Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3).
Unkrich immediately then set out to make a film centered on the holiday, yet struggled to come up with a compelling story within. Now over six years later, Unkrich has seemingly cracked the narrative. Coco, the first all Latino Pixar feature, focuses on Miguel, a young boy who yearns to be a singer despite the misgivings of his parents & grandparents. To escape from his family and follow his dreams, Miguel steals the guitar of his dead idol Ernesto de la Cruz, thrusting him into The City of the Dead (turns out stealing the dead’s items during Dia de los Muertos is a big no-no). Now in order to return to the living, Miguel must find Ernesto and ask him for his approval before the sun rises and he’s stuck there forever.
In the following interview with Lee Unkrich, co-writer/co-director Adrian Molina & producer Darla K Anderson, the trio discusses Coco’s long development process, the original scrapped story and why Dia de los Muertos has suddenly become so popular in pop culture. For the full interview, read below.
How important do you feel a cute animal is to Pixar films given Dug (Up), The Good Dinosaur and now Dante (in Coco)?
[Coco co-stars Dante, a hairless dog that joins Miguel on his journey to The City of the Dead]
LEE UNKRICH: Is Dante really a cute animal?
I think so…
UNKRICH: You know, in this case – having a dog really came out of the research. A lot of ancient Mezo-American beliefs center around traveling to an afterlife. The Aztecs believed that during this journey, to get to the City of The Dead, there were some difficult challenges that you would have along the way. There was this belief that you need to have a dog with you, specifically a xolo dog (a hairless dog), to help you on that journey… so it seemed fitting that we could have a fun animal.
DARLA K. ANDERSON (producer): That was the spark of the idea.
UNKRICH: Then you have this comic sidekick for Miguel, and it was also fitting and part of the mythology that we had studied.
Is it always research that informs the characters in the story?
ADRIAN MOLINA [co-writer/co-director]: Not always, but as much as you can. It's a good way to test whether an idea has earned its way into your world and into your story…
Are you looking to other Pixar films as a template for what works and what doesn't work?
UNKRICH: No – it's more that sometimes we think that we have this really great idea and we run with that idea until someone goes, 'Wait a minute - this is exactly what we did in Ratatouille.' And then everyone just groans in the room because we have to start over and come up with a new solution.
Then are you cognizant of finding different emotional beats for each Pixar film?
UNKRICH: It's never about saying, 'Oh we've done this in Up, so let's try [something else] in this movie.’ It's never that. We go where the story takes us and we hope we have a story that allows for a broad range of tones and emotions. We really just try to go where the story takes us, so it's never about 'we've never done this so let's do that.'
Has the development process at Pixar shifted or changed during the years?
ANDERSON: I don't think so. The zeitgeist and spirit of it all is still the same. People have seasons where they're busy and they're coming and going, but in terms of us getting together and putting the film up every twelve weeks and everyone coming into the room and putting all their energies into supporting the best of what that movie can be -- that process has stayed remarkably consistent.
UNKRICH: It's great to be at a company, especially with the original films, they're given whatever gestation periods they need. Sometimes it’s a long time before something finds it's footing. It's happened again and again. When we made Up, it started out being a very different film then what it finally became and that's happened on a few of our films. Even Coco - this was a very different story at the beginning, but luckily [Pixar] give us the room to try things and fail. We know that's going to be a part of the process until we get to a place where we have a movie that's worthy of being in this world.
What was that initial spark for Coco?
UNKRICH: The original spark was just the idea of doing a story up against The Day of the Dead [Dia de los Muertos]. We didn't quite know what that could be. It could be really anything. Just the notion of doing [a film centered around The Day of the Dead] is what I pitched to John [Lasseter]. John sparked to the idea of setting a story up against the celebration. Then we went on out trying to develop a story and we went through a couple different ideas before we settled on what ultimately became Coco.
What were those ideas?
UNKRICH: Interestingly because I knew a lot of the audience in the world wouldn't be familiar with Day of the Dead, the initial idea was to tell a story about someone who wasn't from Mexico travelling to Mexico. We had a main character who was an American kid, but who had family in Mexico because his mother was Mexican. It made sense to me at that time to have the character learn and discover his own heritage and tradition, so that we could also be teaching the audience about those things at the same time; but we realized at a certain point that we were crafting a story that was antithetical to what Dia de los Muertos is all about. We were making a story about someone learning to work their way through grief and say goodbye to someone they loved, whereas Day of the Dead is about never saying goodbye. It's all about the importance and obligation to remember your loved ones and pass their stories along. Having had that revelation and gone on a lot of research trips and talked with a lot of families, we felt more comfortable telling a story from the inside, from the perspective of a family living in Mexico.
It feels like Day of the Dead recently has begun to permeate pop culture. I mean it was in a James Bond movie... What do you attribute this to?
UNKRICH: It's been in the air certainly.
MOLINA: There's a sense... I grew up in a Mexican American family in California and my mother was from Mexico. Growing up – there was a sense of wanting to fit in, wanting to assimilate... When you're a kid, you want to find ways not to stand out. If you stand out, it could be fodder for being made to feel different. But as I've grown up, it's gotten to a place where people want to embrace the things that make them unique. They want to share their culture and celebrate where they come from and who they are. I think that may have had a little effect on how the world sees these traditions, the exchanging of culture. My personal feeling is that may have had something to do with the collective consciousness of embracing your roots and then that filters out into the world and engages people's imaginations.
UNKRICH: I think people have also been fascinated by the juxtaposition of skeletons with bright colors. The music, the celebration - it's not something, certainly not Americans, that they think of when they think about death. There's also a conflation with Halloween because Dia de los Muertos is right after Halloween. A lot of people conflate the two and think they have a lot to do with each other, but they don’t. They have nothing to do with each other. I hope that when people see this film, they'll walk away from it… hopefully they'll have a great time and an emotional, adventurous time at the movies, but I hope that everyone who sees this movie will come away with an appreciation and understanding of what Day of the Dead is all about.
There seems to be this theme in the film, a juxtaposition between appeasing your family vs. pursuing your own vocation...
UNKRICH: That's really central to the movie. A lot of the story is all about that: that tug between the two. Everyone has a different experience going through life. I know Adrian and I both come from families who were very supportive of what we wanted to do no matter what it was. As my interests changed growing up, everyone was always very supportive, but a lot of people don't have that experience. A lot of people have parents and families that expect them to do certain things or expect them to have a certain type of job, so they have to subvert what they're actually interested in. We thought it would be interesting for our story to have a character caught in the middle of that tug where they had passions their family didn't approve of, but they still loved their family. Miguel doesn't just want to run away from his family and do his own thing, he wants to find a way to have it both ways; but he seems to be in this impossible situation where he can't figure out how to do that. It's this opportunity to go to the Land of the Dead and actually meet his long dead ancestors and his new idol that he hopes will unlock the secret to having it both ways.
Coco opens everywhere November 22nd
