Coco is great. Pixar’s latest is everything you want. It’s gorgeous. It’s respectful. It’s human. Like all Pixar films, it touches the heart with these elements and without resorting to clichés or easy manipulations. Most of all, it surprises. It’s unabashedly about death and the loss of those closest to you and that’s unexpected.
She said to me before we bought tickets, “Isn’t this just another Book of Life?” She meant the 20th Century Fox release we took the girls to see three years ago.
The Book of Life was animator Jorge R. Gutierrez’ 2014 love letter to his Mexican culture and mythology in which netherworld deities wager on a love triangle between a military hero and a reluctant bullfighter who wants to be a musician.
Life is a handsome, fun, and creative film, but it lacks Pixar’s trademark commitment to story and invention.
She said the Coco trailer didn’t engage her. I reminded her she said the same thing about the Moana trailer, the Polynesia-Lin-Manuel Miranda-Disney Princess mashup that we also loved. Come to think of it, both of us were skeptical of the first Inside Out trailer too, and again, we couldn’t have been more wrong.
It makes sense that the trailers for Disney’s and especially Pixar Animation’s films are always a bit weak. They are smart not to give too much away, but they also can’t give too much away. It’s hard to entice the audience with story elements you’ve worked so hard to make unexpected.
Movie trailers only work when the audience can recognize they like love triangles or animation or Lin-Manuel Miranda. Hollywood works very hard to sell us things that look familiar and fresh at the same time. Why do you think there are so many Spiderman sequels? You love Peter Parker—yet he’s all new!
Nothing is both familiar and a surprise. An animated adventure about dying, or the story of the emotions that live in our brain, or for another example, images of rats run amuck in a five-star restaurant kitchen, are visuals we didn’t know we wanted to see and adore. They are tougher sells because they are different—and they only reached audiences because Pixar has been able to do the impossible and create a popular brand for consistently good ingenuity.
My family loved Coco. We choked up just like we did at Moana and Inside Out. That question though—aren’t Coco and Book of Life the same—stayed with me because it’s a good illustration of creativity. Coco, just like The Book of Life, centers on the Mexican Day of the Dead holiday. Both films feature a young man forbidden by his family to play his guitar who goes on an adventure in the afterlife. They sound identical, but they are completely different.
We recognize what is familiar to us. It’s easier to define, to discuss, and it’s more comforting too. Yet it’s nothing like the surprise we seek.
Right around the time we saw Coco in the theater, the Internet was at peak discussion of Netflix’ Stranger Things sequel season two.
Here too, creativity confronts and confuses. The audience wanted the same experience it had the first time Stranger Things surprised them, but if they were given that exact same experience, it would have accomplished the opposite. Such is the conundrum of the sequel.
Much of the second season was similar to the first, but a lot was different too, and you could read the audience struggling with this in the online reviews. It seemed too much like season one and yet characters and relationships had also changed. Yet what else could a sequel be?
The biggest departure was the seventh out of eight episodes, which featured an almost completely new cast and another location and even a change in tone. Stranger Things left Stranger Things behind for an hour. Many fans hated the episode. Others loved “the expansion of the universe.” I know a lot of people who didn’t like season two or season one because Stranger Things is so derivative of 1980s pop culture. To them, the sequel season was a copy of a copy.
The negative opinions were poor critiques. They reflected their authors’ disappointment more than the quality of the show. That type of disappointment will always follow hype once fans make something that was creatively fluid into something concrete. It is the unquenchable human desire to experience something revelatory over and over again.
Audiences need the unexpected. It’s why we go to our screens and fall in love. It’s the reason Pixar and Netflix are so successful.
Sure, Coco is a story about a boy and his dog. Yes, Stranger Things is a remix of Stephen King and Steven Spielberg. It’s their other elements—that aren’t defined as readily and that often go unnoticed behind the familiar—that makes them the atypical and exhilarating works of art that deserve all the attention they get.