Coco

2017 animated movie

Rating: 16/20 (Buster: 20/20)

Plot: A kid in a family that has forbidden music longs to play the guitar and become the next Mexican Elvis. He steals a guitar from a tomb on the Day of the Dead and is whisked to the afterlife where he has to find his father and get back to a less bony existence.

Let's talk about the 20-minute Frozen "short" that preceded this movie. I'm in a small minority of people who like Disney cartoons but almost despised Frozen, so I might not be the person to ask about this Christmas atrocity. Buster said she liked it, but she's not known for having good taste. Ask her about the Descendants movies if you need proof of that. I thought this thing was boring, an animated mini-musical in which they stuffed about twenty boring songs into twenty boring minutes. I was angry about not getting an actual Pixar short anyway, but this Olaf junk put me over the edge and resulted in a fight with a little girl sitting behind us.

Coco itself is in the upper half of Pixar features, a great place for any movie to be in. I might like it as much as Inside-Out or Ratatouille even, but I also might have just been mesmerized by the colors. There's a richness to early scenes in the family's Mexican village and this incredible use of light. Once things get to the Land of the Dead, visuals become impossibly beautiful. Dense lights, all of the colors that have ever existed, and so many details packed into each scene that you feel like you've got no hope to find that Pizza Planet truck.

Add to that eye candy a great visual humor. There's some fun slapstick, and there's not a single boner joke at all. The music is as lively and infectious as it needs to be. I'm not sure this has a single great song in there (though the one about Juanita is cute), but nearly every song in this movie is perfect. And there's one musical moment that I anticipated, perfectly compiling the entire scene in my head to prepare myself so that I wouldn't cry in front of my daughter and that little girl I'd gotten in a fight with earlier, but still cried during anyway because I'm a giant wuss. Damn you, Pixar!