Coco Analysis

Coco

Directed by: Lee Unkrich

A PIXAR film.

Streaming on Hotstar

Academy Award for Best Animated Feature 2017

The premise of Coco falls under the conflict of individual vs community - where Miguel wants to play music but music is banned in his family. As always in Pixar films, we get to see the reason for someone's flaw in order to empathise with them - here we get to know that the great-great-grandfather of the family left his family to pursue music and hence the family is turned averse to music. While it seems a little silly when you look at it on a physical level, but it definitely makes sense - they understand what music can do to a person - it can make them inspired to a level where the start looking at the largeness of life and they tend to not prioritise family after a certain point. So we have a flaw and a reason for the flaw in place, now this film is different from the usual character arcs that Pixar films have, like in Finding Nemo, Up, etc - where in the conflict that they face directly addresses their flaw and they have no other option but to change in order to go ahead. This film constructs the plot in a way that the conflict isn't individual vs community anymore, they flesh drama out of that conflict for a while - but they don't make a choice of individual over family - which would've made in a different world. Pixar films are sweet, endearing, they have a certain moral code, philosophy and tonality - they are rarely anti-authoritarian or anti-societal. They beautifully set up the different worlds in the film - the rules are well established. 

After watching this film is when I understood how complex writing an animated film could be - because literally, anything could happen and there are no limitations to your creativity and that's the most challenging part. If you give someone a premise, a genre, a setting - it's easier to write a story in these limitations but otherwise, the urge to want to write something great will stop you from attempting to write anything - everything that you start to write will not seem good enough.