Disney’s animation studio has struggled to replicate the success of its golden decade that ended in 2012. Can a tale inspired by Mexico’s Day of the Dead excite audiences?

If there is one moment in Pixar’s history that transformed the way we think about children’s animated films, it is the gorgeously rendered opening sequence of Up, showing Carl Fredricksen’s rich, colourful life prior to becoming a grumpy octogenarian. More specifically, it is the final, broken step taken by Carl’s wife Ellie – only minutes ago (in movie time) a young, vibrant child with adventure in her eyes, now suddenly a woman at the end of her life. For a moment, the movie allows us a kind of glimpse across the generations and into our shared humanity that is rare in grownup Hollywood cinema, let alone a kids’ movie.

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It is tempting to imagine the seeds of Coco being sown right there, in the pathos of Carl and Ellie’s final adventure together. For this is another children’s film that plays on our fascination with the lives lived by the generations that came before us. Early footage shown to journalists in London on 19 June suggests it could be one of Pixar’s better moments since the remarkable golden decade between 2003 and 2012, when the studio’s films won an Oscar for best animated movie seven times.

Co-directed by Finding Nemo’s Lee Unkrich and screenwriter Adrian Molina, Coco is the story of a 12-year-old Mexican-American boy, Miguel Rivera (Anthony Gonzalez), who finds himself in the land of the dead, after breaking a decades-old family rule about playing music. The film riffs heavily on the Mexican festival Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), with its traditionally vibrant imagery of brightly coloured skeletons. In this flamboyant netherworld, our young hero sets out on a journey to expose a secret from his family’s past. This, it is heavily hinted, will centre on the famous musician Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), who just happens to be Miguel’s idol.

Coco’s tone is darkly comic, with elements of slapstick. There’s no reverence here for the dead, but there is love and respect. Miguel’s deceased family members are all warmly rendered burlesques, often so clownish and over-the-top that we forget we have been introduced to the walking dead. An excellent gag about there being no toilets in the afterlife, as well as a scene in which Miguel finds himself playing keepy-uppy with a skeleton’s skull, give an idea of the tone.

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This sense of ghoulish bombast is deliberate. Molina says the film-makers wanted to access the sense that thinking about lost loved ones need not be morbid.

“There’s an element of celebration to the [Day of the Dead] festival that leans into this idea of keeping the memories and stories of your loved ones alive to make sure that connection is never broken,” he says. “With this film, I think it creates a very optimistic vision of that link between generations. Once you realise that these characters all have different stories to tell, you stop seeing the skeletons.”

Coco was a cause of controversy in 2013, when Pixar’s parent company Disney tried to trademark the phrase Día de los Muertos for marketing purposes, and was accused of cultural appropriation. The studio backtracked and now has a group of cultural experts – including cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, who made some of the initial criticism – to help ensure no more feathers are ruffled. Molina and his team are keen to flag up the authenticity of the project before its January 2018 release in UK cinemas.

“It’s always been on our mind that this is a tradition that comes from a real place. It’s not some fiction, it’s not made up,” says the first-time co-director. “And so we’ve always known that we have a responsibility to show it in that light and be very thoughtful about our representation.

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“I’m fortunate to be from a Mexican background and to have a certain amount of perspective. We have a lot of artists and technical directors at Pixar who are Mexican and Latino, so as a group we come together and talk through what’s feeling right, what’s feeling not so right. [Producer] Darla [Anderson] and Lee have from the beginning been very focused on storytelling and keeping that authenticity and respect.”

It’s tempting to imagine Pixar as two separate studios: the company that gave us brave artistic choices such as Up, Ratatouille, Wall-E and the brainteasingly brilliant Inside Out; and a more commercially orientated offshoot that trotted out lame sequels such as Cars 2 and Monsters University. But fans of the studio might point out that the company is merely a victim of its own success – that the movies from its golden age set an impossibly high bar.

Coco, at the very least, looks to be venturing into daring territory once again. Up successfully torpedoed the disconnect between young and old, inviting us to see older people in a new light. Pixar’s new film goes a step further, asking us to re-examine our fear of death – a gutsy challenge when the movie’s audience will largely be made up of preteens and their parents.

The symbolism of an all-American company such as Disney making a film derived from Mexican culture in the current political climate is not lost on Molina, who hopes Coco can act as a “vehicle for creating sympathy” in US audiences. “Being able to present a Mexican family and a Mexican story and having people all over the world fall in love with those characters – I think it does a lot in terms of creating connection and allowing for representation,” he says.

If that turns out to be the case, Coco could be a movie with even more resonance than Pixar’s transcendent early hits. Will Miguel and his boney family soon be nestling among the cuddly Nemos and talking Buzz Lightyears in our children’s bedrooms? That would certainly be something.