"Will bring you to tears"

“Remember me

Though I have to say goodbye

Remember me

Don’t let it make you cry”

Threaded through Pixar’s latest film set and focused on Día de Muertos celebration is a song about the importance of keeping those we love in our hearts, even and especially once they’ve left us. When we first hear it, sung in a flashy flashback by the dashing musical icon Ernesto De la Cruz, “Remember Me” is a buoyant anthem that has all the trappings of spectacle. Ernesto (voiced by Benjamin Bratt) is wearing a mariachi suit, his dancers are sporting frilly colorful dresses, there’s even an escalator involved on stage. The tender sentiment of the mournful lyrics are drowned in an all-too plastic production. For many of us, the number (which is played for laughs and establishes De La Cruz as the kind of cartoonish Pedro Infante of Coco’s world) is precisely what we worried would happen when the Emeryville studio greenlit a “Día de Los Muertos” film – and even tried to copyright that title! Wouldn’t the studio that made toys come alive no doubt fail at capturing what it is that makes this Mexican holiday so special? Wouldn’t it just dress it up in culturally tone-deaf representations that signal “Mexicanness” all the while betraying the fact that it was made by and for Anglos? Thankfully, nothing could be further from the truth.

And not just because we can point to the large number of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that poured their hearts into the film. Coco knows very well that the story it’s telling – of a young boy who finds himself stranded in the Land of Dead and needs to get a blessing from his ancestors in order to return to the land of the living where he’ll have to give up his dreams of following in De La Cruz’s footsteps – is rooted in the spirit of the celebration, on family and destiny, on one’s originality and devotion. Shaded with an attention to detail that remains astounding (the deep-cut Frida Kahlo jokes are A+ as is the playful use of alebrijes), Coco is not (just) the flashy mariachi version of “Remember Me” but also its pared-down, family-sung rendition – a lullaby that will bring you to tears by the sheer power of its emotions and the beauty of its message.

– Manuel Betancourt