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. 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.Īnd not just because we can point to the large number of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that poured their hearts into the film. The tender sentiment of the mournful lyrics are drowned in an all-too plastic production. 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. 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. 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. This brings the grand total of reviews written by Latino critics in major publications to one. The same piece was published online a week ago.
He is 3rd-generation Mexican on his mother’s side.
Coco full movie spanish version update#
UPDATE : Today’s print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle will run a review of Coco written by pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub. They need our support to break through the noise. Read them, share them, and follow the writers. Below you will find capsule reviews written by five Latino film critics. It’s about time English-language mainstream outlets started paying attention to our opinions since in Pixar’s Coco it’s our culture that’s being showcased. Someone needed to step in and uplift the voices of Latino film critics. Here at Remezcla we don’t normally publish film reviews, but this felt like a watershed moment. From calling Coco inauthentic to misspelling words in Spanish, the stockpile of opinions disseminated by major media sites has one glaring omission – not one of them is penned by a Latino writer.
The majority of critics have been positive in their remarks about the animated feature, but many lack the cultural competence to discuss the most Mexican aspects of the film. Nowhere is this more evident than in the multitude of reviews published about Pixar’s Coco. Hollywood is a (white) boys’ club, and so is film criticism.