The Book of Life

2014 cartoon

Rating: 13/20 (Jen: 17/20; Emma: 10/20; Abbey: 11/20; Buster: 20/20)

Plot: Two gods make a wager over which boy will end up winning a young girl's heart. The winner gets to control the colorful Land of the Remembered while the loser gets stuck with the far-uglier Land of the Forgotten.

Every time I was nearly convinced that this movie was good, something would happen--a new irritating character, an inappropriate reference, a silly aside--that reminded me that it really wasn't. I really wanted to like it. It was obvious that a lot of effort went into the creation of this thing, that the makers had a story to tell that was important to them, and that it could help bring another culture into the homes of middle-class white kids. Unfortunately, I thought it was a real mess. There's no doubt that the film's got originality, and the look is a unique one. It reminded me more of Henry Selick's stop-motion creations than CGI stuff. The characters actually look like they're made out of wood, and I liked that texture. It took me a while to get used to the abnormal shapes and body types for the characters. I mean, the men all have absurd shoulders and chins that would make Bruce Campbell a little envious. And check out Maria's waistline. A few characters make it seem like Picasso got a hold of the storyboard and decided to throw in a few of his own Cubist creations--noses akimbo, obscenely-contorted jawlines, eyes on the same side of a person's head. I didn't think I liked it at all; it reminded me of a more fleshed-out version of something you'd see on Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network where they're not afraid to children characters in grotesque shapes. Gradually, they grew on me. And the colors? Damn, those colors! There are moments when the amount of colors just feels bewildering and chaotic, but in a good way. Several times, I almost wanted to pause the movie and move my face closer to the television to absorb those colors more. The Land of the Remembered sequences are especially beautiful although I'm not sure there's a single shot in this movie--at least prior to when they get to the more dismally-decorated Land of the Forgotten--that doesn't have at least two thousand colors on the screen. There was a part of me that wanted to be Mexican and then dead, just so I could live in a world with that much color. And luckily for me, I'd get to live in the Land of the Remembered for a very long time because I'd leave this blog behind as a legacy.

Unfortunately, there's only stock characters lackadaisically created to inhabit those grotesque bodies and not much of a story to fill this rich settings. I hated the children in the frame story, ruffians at a museum listening to a woman tell the movie's story with these figurines. And I was never really interested in any of these characters. There were characters in the background who I really felt like spending more time with, or at least I was more interested in their stories than the predictable story I was being forced to follow. Maria is as thinly-defined as she is thin. She's a character almost entirely devoid of substance, the kind of thing you'd think would offend most feminists. The burly heroes are given their one or two attributes and then taken on journeys in which those attributes become redundant. They're irritating because they're just not interesting at all. A character voiced by Ice Cube, one who Buster called Santa Claus, was just irritating because he was irritating. I think I also would have liked this more if it was more culturally consistent, but in order to hook audiences raised on Jimmy Neutron, milkshakes, and Rice Krispies, this is stuffed with Americanisms and Mexican-ish renditions of songs written by white and black people. It further muddied things, made the tone of this largely incoherent. Is it too much to ask for a movie that is about something so important to Mexican culture to be more Mexican? Is it too much to ask for a movie that is so vibrant and visually captivating to give us an interesting story and characters?