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It's a given that Pixar has cracked the code for calibrating the perfect feeling-all-the-feels moment: That instant where the narrative taps into its audience's deepest emotions and reduces it to tears. It's there in "Toy Story 3." "Up," of course. "Inside Out."

"Coco" is no different - though there's something uniquely effective about how it gets you to that place.

While there have been songs in Pixar movies before "Coco," musical numbers have always been much more integral to the Disney canon. And within the last 30 years, many of those Disney movies took advantage of a Broadway staple: the reprise.

In movies like "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," and, more recently, "Moana," the reprise is a return to the melody of an earlier song, used as a declarative statement reinforcing the protagonist's will in their journey.

"Watch and you'll see, someday I'll be part of your world," Ariel belts to an aloof Prince Eric.

"Coco," Pixar's most musical feature to date, offers a twist on the reprise. Rather than pump you up for the big adventure, it'll bring on all the tears - in the best way possible.

The first time we hear "Remember Me," while watching "Coco," it's performed as an up-tempo romantic tune by the famous singer Ernesto de la Cruz:

But when we hear it again later, it takes on a new form: A lullaby by Coco's father, Héctor, written for baby Coco:

Only when Miguel, Coco's great-grandson, travels to the Land of the Dead does he discover the true history of "Remember Me": Ernesto, upset that Héctor planned to abandon his career and return to his family, poisoned his friend and stole Héctor's songs to seek fame.

In the movie's final act, Miguel returns to the living and hopes to restore Coco's memories of Héctor. The song returns again.

He pleads with her: "I saw your papá!"

Hunched over in her wheelchair, she seems to stare off into nowhere.

Miguel again: What about papá's guitar?

Nothing.

But then - the guitar again.

One last thread of hope.

"Mama Coco, your papá - he wanted you to have this."

Miguel begins to strum the guitar and perform the song Coco's papá wrote for her as a little girl. "Remember me," he sings in a near-whisper, through tears. "Though I have to say goodbye."

Cut to a close up of Coco's hand, draped on the arm of her wheelchair, twitching ever so slightly. The camera moves up to her face, and in that moment, the tiniest flicker appears in her downward cast eyes:

Let's pause for a second here. The restorative power of memory is a recurring theme: To remember someone is to keep their spirit alive. But it's how one is thought of that is equally important.

As Miguel continues to sing, the elder Coco's face begins to soften and come alive. She shuts her eyes for a moment, then joins in, a smile widening upon her face:

Miguel's face brightens and they lock eyes. Abuelita, Coco's daughter, is drawn in, too, her own eyes welling with tears. A close up on Coco's face. She's absolutely glowing. She remembers:

As I take in "Remember Me" this last time, I recall what that song means to Coco and Héctor, and what it now means to Miguel, who, like myself, gains a new understanding of its lyrics.

While the connection between the song and its characters is very specific to the story, there's an element of universality that links it to my own experiences as a viewer - the passage of time, loss, family.

And then, through my tears, I think of the memories I have of my own loved ones, and how precious, and precarious, they are.

The repeated occurrences of "Remember Me" are not just a clever play on the movie's themes of recollection and family, or, as in its Disney predecessors, the rallying cry of a protagonist ready to take on the world. "Remember Me" is a gut punch, that fittingly lingers long after it's gone.

Aisha Harris is an assistant editor on the Culture Desk at The New York Times.

Images and clips: Disney/Pixar

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It's a given that Pixar has cracked the code for calibrating the perfect feeling-all-the-feels moment: That instant where the narrative taps into its audience's deepest emotions and reduces it to tears. It's there in "Toy Story 3." "Up," of course. "Inside Out."

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Warning: Spoilers ahead for the end of Pixar's new film Coco.

Pixar's new animated movie Coco follows a boy named Miguel on an accidental journey through the Land of the Dead. He befriends a dead man named Hector who desperately wants his living daughter Coco to remember him. But Coco is very old, and her memory is fading. She spends her scenes sitting still, lost in thought, unable to identify members of her own family.

Even in a film where skeletons sing and dance in a neon afterlife, it's a magical scene

When Miguel returns to the land of the living, he plays Coco a song her father wrote for her and sang to her often when she was a child. The music revives Coco, and she happily sings along with Miguel. She regains her ability to speak and recognize her daughter, and she speaks cogently to her gathered family about her childhood. Even in a film where skeletons sing and dance in a neon afterlife, it's a magical scene in two ways: it's moving and emotional, and it's hard to accept as realistic. But while the degree of Coco's recovery is unlikely, experts say Coco actually gets a lot of things right about memory and music.

Coco's memory loss looks like the result of dementia, a series of brain changes that make it harder to think, remember, communicate, and function. Dementia affects 47 million people worldwide, and although the movie never names it specifically, Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause for people over age 65. It's a progressive disease that eats away at memory and self-identity. But there are hints that musical memories are spared, which has led to a debate about how common this is, and how music could be harnessed to help patients with dementia.

"In the healthy brain, music is a very, very vivid way of reanimating memories," says Jason Warren, a professor of neurology at University College London. "But it's not clear in dementia when you have a damaged system, whether it would bring back reminiscence and familiarity of the experience, or whether it would actually bring back the details."

"If you would just start singing children's songs with her, she would just start to sing along."

There are hints from case reports and anecdotes that it could - like the story that inspired University of Amsterdam graduate student Joern-Henrik Jacobsen. Like Coco, the grandmother of Jacobsen's partner had serious dementia and could barely recognize her family, Jacobsen says. But she could remember songs. "If you would just start singing children's songs with her, she would just start to sing along," he says.

A few small observational studies back up Jacobsen's experience. One case report describes a piano player with Alzheimer's who could finish a song if someone started it for him. But other "name-that-tune"-style studies designed to figure out whether Alzheimer's patients could still remember music have had mixed results. That may be in part because the disease can make it harder for people to remember a song's name, even if the melody is familiar.

"The Pixar plot probably has a grain of scientific truth."

There's another challenge, too: there are multiple types of musical memory, and not all studies investigate the same one. There's the memory of events from your life: a kind of mental time-travel back to important moments, like a specific recital or concert. There are also more general memories that make up a person's self-knowledge, like when Coco recalls that she used to sing that particular song with her father. And there are also motor memories about how to perform certain tasks, like, in Coco's case, singing a song. That's the part of Coco's memory that Warren thinks is most likely to be restored by music. "The Pixar plot probably has a grain of scientific truth," he says.

That's supported by Jacobsen's brain-imaging research, published in 2015 in the journal Brain. The study's findings are still early and correlative, but they suggest that brain regions involved in making predictions and planning a sequence of movements are important for music memory. These regions also appear relatively functional in patients with Alzheimer's, the study says. "That makes a lot of sense if you think about a piece of music as some sort of sequence of movements," Jacobsen says.

Coco's recollection that she sang the song with her father is also borderline plausible, Warren says - memories of parents are powerful. But her renewed ability to speak and recognize her family members is less so. "It's asking an awful lot of any stimulus, including music, to repair degenerating brain tissue," he says. "It's up against this enormous progression of disease."

"You can see signs, sometimes faces changing, people smiling."

Renaud La Joie, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center, agrees. "They're not going to recover language," he says. But until there's a cure, music therapy does seem to help boost patients' moods, a recent study of studies called a metanalysis shows. "You can see signs, sometimes faces changing, people smiling," La Joie says.

Coco's clear happiness to be singing with her great-grandson is something Coco got very right. But La Joie appreciated one thing about the movie that's more important than accuracy: it showed a person with dementia approaching the end of her life with dignity and surrounded by love. "I thought it was beautiful the way it was depicted in the movie, that she was being respected by her family," La Joie says. "This is something we don't get to see enough in media, or the movies."

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What Coco gets right about music and memory

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Warning: Spoilers ahead for the end of Pixar's new film Coco. Pixar's new animated movie Coco follows a boy named Miguel on an accidental journey through the Land of the Dead. He befriends a dead man named Hector who desperately wants his living daughter Coco to remember him.

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'Coco' still courtesy of Disney-Pixar

-Vanessa Erazo, Remezcla Film Editor

"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

"A blissful hug of acceptance"

Hollywood studios regularly make movies that cost $100 million and up. If it's about pirates or wizards, execs will hand over as much as $300 million to producers. Films about Latinos typically fall on the other end of the spectrum with budgets under a million and a handful of features that cost up to $50 million. Never has a story that features an all-Latino cast surpassed eight figures in its production budget, until Pixar's Coco.

The vibrantly colorful animated feature that draws on Día de Muertos celebrations could easily have gone askew, and Latino audiences are unforgiving. But with Coco, there is absolutely no cause for concern. With nods to the tres raizes (three roots) of Latino culture - indigenous, Spanish, and African - Pixar crafted a gorgeously drawn homage that rings true. While non-Mexicans may miss many of these references, they won't enjoy it any less.

Everyone in the audience will belly laugh at Abuelita's perfect puntería in the chancla-throwing department and wipe away tears when Miguel's bisabuela Coco sings along with him to the sweetly composed "Remember Me," but for Mexicans there is an additional burst of pride that piles on top of the rapturous feeling that comes from being entertained. From the little strips of corn husk lovingly tied around Abuelita's tamales, to the bright embroidered flowers on the blusas bordadas worn by Miguel's mom and sister (all signaling indigenous influences), and the zapateado (a traditional dance involving percussive footwork) that Gael García Bernal's character Héctor performs in the Land of the Dead while singing the catchy son jarocho tune "Un poco loco" - Mexican culture is treated with dignity, honor, respect, and the utmost reverence. It is not exotic or seen as foreign, in fact it's normalized.

As a Mexican-Salvadoran-American who grew up on a steady diet of Hollywood Anglo films and the "Hispanic Hollywood" movies of the eighties ( La Bamba, Born in East LA, Stand and Deliver), there may never be a more important production than Pixar's Coco. It's a blissful hug of acceptance in a time when the very existence of Latinos in this country is criminalized. Just like a freshly made tamale on Christmas Eve or a loud mariachi song waking you up on Sunday morning, Coco feels like home.

- Vanessa Erazo

"Beautiful, heartwarming, and visually exceptional"

After less-than-stellar attempts by a few major animation studios over the last few years to include Latino characters in their blockbuster family fare - clichéd offerings like supervillain El Macho in Despicable Me 2, taco truck owners Tito and Angel in Turbo and Spanish-language-mode Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story 3 - it would only be natural to feel at least a little skeptical that, culturally speaking, the animation industry in Hollywood could actually get it right (2014's The Book of Life came close, but left much to be desired).

With Coco, Pixar Animation Studios' take on the traditional Mexican celebration Día de Muertos, audiences are given a film that will become the standard-bearer of a positive example of what the Latino experience can look like on the big screen for years to come. Don't think Coco is a film that was created merely to placate Latino moviegoers. These smartly written, emotionally driven characters are what Latino audiences should expect going forward. Salsa-dancing, nacho-eating, lucha libre mask-wearing stereotypes never cut it before, and Coco proves why that representation should never be an option again if studios hope to capture authenticity in its storytelling.

Coco is a beautiful, heartwarming, and visually exceptional achievement. The story of Miguel Rivera, a young, ambitious musician who crosses over to the Land of the Dead to find his purpose in life by connecting with his ancestors, is a universal narrative about the appreciation of family, the acceptance of loss and the aspiration to become what you were born to be. From the vibrant and imaginative papel picado-inspired opening sequence to the extraordinarily moving final act (the song "Recuérdame" will likely melt you into a bowl of champurrado), Coco is a cinematic gift to Latinos worldwide and easily the best animated film of the year. Gracias, Pixar.

- Kiko Martinez

"Enchanting and dazzling"

Pixar's ode to Día de Muertos is exquisitely full of life. Coco is a joyous, and surprisingly reverent celebration of all things Mexicano. Nearly everything about it is breathtaking, from its eye-popping visual splendor to its warmly beating heart. The vibrant colors, rousing music, and moving story will leave viewers alternately delighted and emotional. The animated film not only honors, it exuberantly celebrates the traditions, music and spirituality of Mexico, moving seamlessly between English and Spanish.

Endearing 12-year old Miguel Rivera (voiced terrifically by Anthony Gonzalez) has a large, loving family, and is particularly close to his adorably wizened great-grandmother Mama Coco (Ana Ofelia Murguia). They run a shoemaking business - La Familia Zapateros. It's a matriarchal enterprise, begun by Miguel's great-great grandmother - and Coco's mother - Mama Imelda (Alanna Ubach), after Coco's father left with his guitar and never returned. Because of his abandonment, the family has banned music from their home for generations. Rather than spoil the emotionally resonant story, which unspools at an ideal pace, let's simply say that music and Día de Muertos are equally important to the plot.

Coco is deftly written by Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich, with plenty of gently macabre humor, as well as sweetly tender moments. Richly drawn characters are exceptionally well voiced. Gael García Bernal as the affable songwriter Héctor is a standout. Wisely, the pitch-perfect cast - as directed by Molina and Toy Story 3's Lee Unkrich - is composed almost entirely of Latino and Mexican actors, including Benjamin Bratt and Edward James Olmos.

Michael Giacchino's ecletic score incorporates traditional Mexican ballads such as "La Llorona" and catchy compositions like Germaine Franco's "Un Poco Loco" and "Remember Me" by Frozen songwriters Kristin Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.

The afterlife is gorgeously rendered, its skeletal denizens festively attired and coiffed, with a hilarious recurring joke featuring Frida Kahlo. Alebrijes - brightly painted, whimsical Oaxacan sculptures - are transformed into iridescent spirit guides that guard the dead. The story is steeped in Mexican folklore. Filmmakers took pains to get it right by spending time in Mexico and consulting influential Latino artists, as well as having the Mexican-American artist Molina co-write the script. Happily, Coco did not get whitewashed.

The movie's message about family, forgiveness, and unconditional love is poignant and profound, flying in the face of presidential proclamations about rapists, murderers, and drug traffickers. Enchanting and dazzling, Coco is a resplendent love letter to Mexico.

- Claudia Puig

"A custom-made gift created with local approval in mind"

Like the dead in Coco, who can't return home if they are forgotten, memories are the only thing that borders can't prevent me from returning to. Unable to travel to Mexico for over a decade now, I missed my grandmother's funeral. Mama Jose, as her grandchildren called her, was a strong and loving matriarch - not unlike the title character in Pixar's latest. In a bittersweet way, that unresolved loss slipped back into my being as the wondrous rendering of a country I can only see from afar materialized in every richly designed frame.

The separation highlighted in the film may appear to be strictly metaphysical, but for immigrants it echoes the pain of not being able to be near loved ones while they are still alive. The hope for something beyond this physical realm becomes more spiritually critical when thinking of those we couldn't say goodbye to in this world. Whether conscious or not, Coco will speak to Mexicans on this side of the border in relation to that incomplete chapter miles away from their new home.

Coco is a bridge between those who are gone and those who remain, whether that means they've departed forever or just find themselves apart. It's a bridge made of bright cempasúchil, centuries of hardship, economic migration, reconnections, newfound appreciation for the past, and culture depicted through animation. It's a bridge between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, between relatives that never met because time or laws didn't allow it, between English and Spanish, between rural Mexico and chilangos like me, and between Hollywood and Latinos.

For those in Mexico, like my mother, Coco feels like a custom-made gift created with local approval in mind. In my mother's eyes, the movie is so specifically Mexican she wonders whether people around the world will enjoy it. I think so, but in any case, Mexicans, the most important judges, have already spoken via ticket sales. Sure, global viewers might pick up on the universality of the story, but will they notice seemingly minor embellishments like the cameos by Mexican icons, the Mexican soccer jersey on one of the characters, the pan dulce on the table, the details in the grandmother's apron, or the rustic cemetery? Probably not, and that's okay. We noticed.

On a joyfully childish level, Coco gave me hope that if Mama Jose is where Mama Coco is, then someday borders won't keep us apart.

- Carlos Aguilar

animation coco disney movie review pixar

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We Asked 5 Latino Film Critics to Review 'Coco,' Because #FilmCriticismSoWhite

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Vanessa Erazo, Remezcla Film Editor "Remember meThough I have to say goodbyeRemember meDon'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.

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Miguel is voiced by young actor Anthony González. The movie's trickster Hector is voiced by Golden Globe award-winning Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. Actress Renée Victor and Benjamin Bratt also star in the movie.

Molina, who is Mexican-American, said that his own family and personal experiences, along with the experiences of other Latino colleagues, helped the Pixar team ensure that the Latino narratives they were telling were not clichés. The intent of the team was to make sure the movie celebrated Mexican families and Mexican culture and traditions.

"We're a multifaceted community, so you know being able to sit in a room with a dozen people from the community and talk about those things has a different effect on the story than when you're just one person in the room, so that was very crucial for me when writing it," Molina told NBC News. "There's a huge desire within the audience to see Latinos on screens, you know being the heroes and telling their stories, so I think from that perspective it's going to mean a lot for Latinos and I think it will mean a lot to non-Latinos, too."

The movie was written and directed by Hollywood director Lee Unkrich, who is white. Unkrich told the New York Times that he had no firm connections to Mexico or its traditions. He also didn't want to be accused of cultural appropriation, which is why he relied heavily on his Latino team members, as well as why he felt the need to hire several outside consultants. He and his team also took several research trips to Mexico throughout the making of the film to spend time with Mexican families.

One of the consultants hired to help consult in the making of "Coco" was acclaimed Los Angeles-based syndicated cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz. Alcaraz, who was once a big critic of Disney, was contacted by producers to help oversee the direction of the movie. For Alcaraz, this was a fulfillment of his childhood; "not dreams, but requirements."

"When I was growing up we never dreamed of seeing anything like this on TV or film that shows a little brown boy with his Mexican family, being normal and reflecting us. Representation really matters, and creating content that reflects us, because we don't see any of it," said Alcaraz. "This is Pixar's first film, really, about people of color that aren't green and pink or inside a little girl's brain, so it's a historic moment in animation and Hollywood."

Alcaraz and other consultants would watch clips of the movie throughout the process and give notes to directors about what they thought worked and what didn't. They also suggested adding more Spanish words and phrases into the script. He said that the directors were open and listened to the critiques and changes, so that it would ring more authentic to bilingual, bicultural Latinos.

"People are anxious to see it, I've never seen anything like it," Alcaraz told NBC News. "Online people are going bonkers. They are taking their 90-year-old abuelas, and tías with an oxygen tank," he said with a laugh. "Everyone is taking their elderly relatives to the movies, so this movie is already accomplishing bringing families together."

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'Coco': A Latino-themed movie that gets it right

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Miguel is voiced by young actor Anthony González. The movie's trickster Hector is voiced by Golden Globe award-winning Mexican actor Gael García Bernal. Actress Renée Victor and Benjamin Bratt also star in the movie.

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Credit... Disney/Pixar

With the new "Coco, " Pixar Animation Studios aims to bring the dead to vivid, reverent life. The movie is set against the backdrop of Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), the Mexican holiday when families gather to honor ancestors by building altars to them and decorating their grave sites.

The film (due Nov. 22) centers on a young boy, Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), an aspiring musician whose adventures take him to the land of the dead, a towering metropolis that is home to departed loved ones. In their research, Pixar filmmakers made trips to Mexico and embedded with families to observe the ways they paid tribute to their forebears. Hallmarks of their traditions (like paths of flowers and the warm glow of candlelight) are woven into the movie's visual language. Here, the director Lee Unkrich ("Toy Story 3") and the production designer Harley Jessup explain how, using three of the film's set pieces.

Miguel walks along a glowing bed of flowers that takes him into the land of the dead. In their visits to Mexico on Día de los Muertos, the filmmakers would see trails of marigold petals leading from cemeteries to houses - a symbolic path to help guide ancestors home. "Our story department took that idea and literally connected the two worlds with the marigold bridge, which we tried to make as spectacular as we could," Mr. Jessup said.

The look of the land itself was inspired by the city of Guanajuato, a former silver-mining town on a hillside peppered with brightly colored buildings that make for a vertical architectural display.

The filmmakers turned this into a fantastical design with clusters of towers nearly a mile high. Because the land grows more populous each day as the newly dead arrive, additions are continually made to the towers and they keep rising higher into the sky. But Mr. Jessup emphasized that the animators were always mindful of the roots of the design. "We wanted to make the land of the dead seem authentic and to be really connected to the culture of Mexico rather than sort of randomly imagined," he said.

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Credit... Disney/Pixar

In an early sequence set in Miguel's Mexican town, the fictional Santa Cecilia, he walks through a cemetery. Its design is an amalgam of graveyards the filmmakers visited in the states of Oaxaca and Michoacán. "When you walk into these cemeteries, they're just gorgeous," Mr. Unkrich said. "It's like an endless sea of candles, and the marigold flowers are everywhere. So it creates this beautiful golden glow." As families tended the graves of their loved ones, some would play music quietly and others would spend the night at their plots. The filmmakers wanted to capture this on a scale that's both grand and intimate at once.

In the cemetery, Miguel visits the tomb of his inspiration, the superstar musician Ernesto de la Cruz. Dwarfing the gravestones, Ernesto's bold mausoleum was modeled on the monuments built to remember Mexican showbiz icons like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete.

" We tried to do something that was even beyond those," Mr. Unkrich said, "because we were creating this fictitious character who was supposed to be the most famous person ever to have come out of Mexico."

This is the transportation hub for dead family members (who are depicted as enhanced skeletons) traveling to the land of the living. Miguel goes there on his journey, and has to pass back through it to get to the land of the living. The animators looked to the actual transit system and buildings of Mexico City. The trolleys, for example, are meant to be recycled cars once used in that city. The iron railings and supports of the 1907 Palacio de Correos, in Mexico City's historic center, also inspired the animators. Additionally, they studied the nearby Gran Hotel, which has a colorful stained-glass ceiling. "What we also liked is that it is literally skeletal," Mr. Jessup said about the building, "so we could work a lot of skeleton motifs into the bases of the pillars and the stained glass."

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In 'Coco,' Bringing the Land of the Dead Back to Life (Published 2017)

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With the new "Coco, " Pixar Animation Studios aims to bring the dead to vivid, reverent life. The movie is set against the backdrop of Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), the Mexican holiday when families gather to honor ancestors by building altars to them and decorating their grave sites.

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In ‘Coco,’ Death Is the Point (Published 2017)

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A villain’s demise, a parent’s absence. That’s how death used to figure in animated movies for children. Thanks to Pixar and now “Coco,” that’s changing.

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Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) in "Coco," the new film from Pixar. Credit... Disney/Pixar

Coco

Directed by Lee Unkrich , Adrian Molina

Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Music, Mystery

PG

1h 45m

One of the pleasures of a new Pixar feature is the chance to be amazed by what animation can do. Sometimes you witness a big, bold breakthrough, like the computer-assisted rendering of fur in "Monsters, Inc.," of water in "Finding Nemo," or of metal in "Cars." The innovations in "Coco" are no less satisfying for being of a more subtle kind. The grain of leather and the rusted folds of corrugated metal have a rough, almost tactile quality. Human bones, hairless dogs and orange flower petals look uncannily (but not too uncannily) real. There are moments of cinematic rigor - when the animators mimic the movements and focal effects of an old-fashioned camera in actual physical space - that will warm any film-geek's heart. Not to mention the Frida Kahlo-inspired musical number with dancing papaya seeds.

"Coco" is also one of those Pixar movies that attempt a conceptual breakthrough, an application of the bright colors and open emotionalism of modern, mainstream animation to an unlikely zone of experience. From the very start, the studio has explored the inner lives of inanimate objects like lamps and toys with a tenderness we now take for granted. It has also summoned the post-human future ( "Wall-E") and the human unconscious ( "Inside/Out") with breathtaking ingenuity. And now it has set out to make a family-friendly cartoon about death.

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"Coco" was directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina. Credit... Disney Pixar

Don't let that scare you or your children away. There is a murder (revealed in the third act) and a fatal church-bell-related accident (witnessed in the first), but the afterlife in "Coco" is a warm and hectic place, more comical than creepy. The story takes place during the Day of the Dead, when according to Mexican tradition (at least as interpreted by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, who directed the screenplay written by Mr. Molina and Matthew Aldrich), the border controls between life and death relax and the departed are allowed temporary passage to the land of the living. A young boy named Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) makes the trip in reverse, which is not to say that he dies, but rather that his living self, through one of several metaphysical loopholes that the movie explains as it goes along, is transported into a fantastical world of specters and skeletons, who hold fabulous parties and raucous outdoor concerts.

Nearly as enchanting as that magical realm is the Mexican village of Santa Cecilia, Miguel's hometown, where he is part of a prosperous clan of shoemakers. The cultural vibe of "Coco" is inclusive rather than exoticizing, pre-empting inevitable concerns about authenticity and appropriation with the mixture of charm and sensitivity that has become something of a 21st-century Disney hallmark. Here, the importance of family - the multigenerational household that sustains and constrains the hero - is both specific and universal. It's what explains the particular beats of Miguel's story and what connects him to viewers regardless of background.

He shows a certain kinship with other well-known recent cartoon characters. A gifted musician in a family that forbids music, he is a bit like Remy, the "Ratatouille" rat whose kin were hostile to his artistic ambition, and like Mumble, the misfit penguin in "Happy Feet." Miguel's genealogical quest - a search for roots, lost ancestors and information that might explain who he is - resembles Dory's journey in "Finding Dory." The sidekicks who accompany him, animal and (formerly) human, are drawn from a familiar well of archetypes, and the final round of lesson-learning and reconciliation hits notes we have heard many times before.

But if "Coco" doesn't quite reach the highest level of Pixar masterpieces, it plays a time-tested tune with captivating originality and flair, and with roving, playful pop-culture erudition. Miguel's musical role model - and the source of the family embargo on musical expression - is a long-dead crooner and movie star named Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). In life and in death, he incarnates venerable ideals of romance and wounded machismo, or at least their show-business incarnations. (His greatest hits and movie clips form part of the texture of "Coco," the way the old "Woody's Roundup" show did in the "Toy Story" movies.)

The purer embodiment of that tradition is Héctor (Gael García Bernal), a ragged, forgotten ghost who befriends Miguel. What links Héctor with de la Cruz is a lurid story of passion, betrayal and longing. Their lives and deaths are a ballad whose meaning and melody Miguel must learn. In doing so, he will understand the thread that links him to both of them, and also the sources of the anti-musical animus that runs so strongly in his maternal line.

Coco is the name of Miguel's great-grandmother, who turns out to be the heart of the story. Her mother, Imelda (Alanna Noël Ubach), is a furious matriarch on the other side of the grave, while Coco's daughter, Miguel's Abuelita (Renée Victor), is a no-nonsense flesh-and-blood autocrat. Their determination to silence Miguel's guitar arises from heartbreak, and from the instrument's association with the waywardness of men.

"Coco" avoids the darker tones associated with this theme, in the way that old murder ballads are sometimes reconceived as children's songs. It's reassuring rather than haunting, which is a shrewd and successful commercial compromise, but a compromise all the same.

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Review: 'Coco' Brings the Pixar Touch to Death

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Coco Directed by Lee Unkrich , Adrian Molina Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Music, Mystery PG 1h 45m One of the pleasures of a new Pixar feature is the chance to be amazed by what animation can do.

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One weekend last fall, my boyfriend, Andrew, whose favorite movies include "Deliverance" and the original "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," went off to go see the Pixar movie "Coco," by himself, and came back in a delirium of happy, wistful tears. "What's going on with you?" I asked, watching him wheel his bike back into the living room. I hadn't moved from my permanent station behind my computer monitor, a hub for the ongoing erosion of my belief in human good. "You have to go to see 'Coco,' " he croaked. "You have to. It's, like, the best movie of all time."

I assumed that he was being hyperbolic, until a night in April when I invited three friends over to watch "Coco," all of us first-time viewers with high expectations. People we knew-people in their twenties and thirties, few of them with children-had been freaking out about "Coco" in group texts and random conversations, saying things like, "I cried so hard I started choking," and "I've watched it five times this month on airplanes." "Hey ppl over here getting drunk and watching Coco just fyi," I texted Andrew, who was still at the office. In return, I received a series of panicked instructions to not start without him. "You have already seen it...." I texted. "I DON'T CARE!!!!!!!" he texted back. "DON'T START WITHOUT ME!!!!"

We started without him. Andrew came home a third of the way into the movie, cracked a beer, and silently sat down on the floor of the living room to watch. By the end, every one of us was crying through a manic grin. "I told you," he said. "It's the best movie of all time."

In the weeks since that viewing, "Coco" love has continued to spread among my demographic-thanks, in part, to the movie's release on Netflix in May. "Coco" is unlike any film I can think of: it presents death as a life-affirming inevitability; its story line about grudges and abandonment makes you feel less alone. The protagonist, Miguel, is a twelve-year-old boy in the fictional Mexican town of Santa Cecilia-named for the patron saint of musicians-and he is trying to get out from under the shadow of his great-great-grandfather, who left his family to pursue a career as a musician. His wife, the ferocious Mamá Imelda, was left to take care of their young daughter, Coco. She instituted a permanent household ban on music and started making shoes.

We meet Coco as an old woman. Her daughter, Miguel's grandmother, now runs the family and its shoemaking business with an iron chancla. Earnest, sweet Miguel teaches himself to play the guitar in the attic, watching and re-watching tapes of the bygone star Ernesto de la Cruz. On the Day of the Dead, he accidentally shatters a framed photograph on the family ofrenda, then spots a hidden detail in the picture, one that makes him suspect that his wayward ancestor was in fact de la Cruz himself. He sprints to the town mausoleum, hoping to borrow de la Cruz's guitar and prove the value of music to his family. Instead, the guitar turns Miguel invisible, and whisks him across a skybridge covered in thick, soft marigold petals that glow like lava. He falls to his knees in the petals, and then looks up to see a grand floating metropolis, confetti-colored in the darkness: the Land of the Dead.

The second and third acts of the movie are mostly set in this city of jubilant sugar-skull skeletons, where you exist only as long as you are remembered by the living. (You can cross over to the living world on the Day of the Dead, but only if your photo is on display.) Miguel joins up with a raggedy show-biz hustler named Héctor, who's desperate to get his picture back up on an ofrenda, and who says he can bring Miguel to de la Cruz. Héctor lives in a waterfront shantytown filled with people who are about to be forgotten; at one point, he begs a guitar for Miguel off an ill-tempered cowboy named Chicharrón, who vanishes as soon as Héctor finishes singing an old dirty song.

Eventually, Miguel realizes that Héctor is his real ancestor, and the movie sprints to a conclusion that's as skillfully engineered to produce waterworks as the montage at the beginning of "Up." But until the end, "Coco" is mostly, wonderfully, a mess of conflict and disappointment and sadness. Héctor seems to have failed everyone who takes a chance on him. Miguel's face, painted in skeleton camouflage, often droops as if he were a sad little black-and-white dog. "Coco" is animated by sweetness, but this sweetness is subterranean, bursting through mostly in tiny details: the way that both Mamá Imelda and Miguel's grandmother brandish shoes when they're angry; or how the daffy Xolo dog that accompanies Miguel on his adventure is named Dante; or how the skeletons return to their city through the Day of the Dead's efficient T.S.A. system, declaring the churros and beer that their families gave them for their journey home.

Before "Coco" hit theaters, it was easy to doubt that the movie would present Mexican culture as expansively and gorgeously as it does, with such natural familiarity and respect. It is Pixar's nineteenth movie, but its first with a nonwhite protagonist; Lee Unkrich, the director and creator of the initial story, is white. The movie's working title was "Día de los Muertos," and, in 2013, Disney lawyers tried, absurdly, to trademark that phrase. But Unkrich and his team approached their subject with openness and collaborative humility: they travelled to Mexico, they loosened Pixar's typical secrecy to build a large network of consultants, and, after the trademark controversy, they asked several prominent critics to come onboard. "Coco" is the first movie to have both an all-Latino cast and a nine-figure budget. It grossed more than eight hundred million dollars worldwide, won two Oscars, and became the biggest blockbuster in Mexican history.

"Coco" is also a definitive movie for this moment: an image of all the things that we aren't, an exploration of values that feel increasingly difficult to practice in the actual world. It's a story of a multigenerational matriarchy, rooted in the past-whereas real life, these days, feels like an atemporal, structureless nightmare ruled by men. It's about lineage and continuity at a time when each morning makes me feel like my brain is being wiped and battered by new flashes of cruelty, as though history is being forgotten and only the worst parts rewritten. It feels like myth or science fiction to imagine that our great-great-grandchildren will remember us. If we continue to treat our resources the way we are treating them currently, those kids-if they exist at all-will live in a world that is ravaged, punishing, artificial, and hard.

This world is hard enough already: its technological conditions induce emotional alienation, and its economic ones narrow our attention to questions of individual survival. As it is, I haven't assembled the ofrenda I ought to. I barely feel like I'm taking adequate care of the people I love right now, and I mean the ones I know personally. I feel certain that I'm failing the people I don't know but that I love nonetheless-the people in our national community, and the people who are seeking to become a part of it.

"Coco" is a movie about borders more than anything-the beauty in their porousness, the absolute pain produced when a border locks you away from your family. The conflict in the story comes from not being able to cross over; the resolution is that love pulls you through to the other side. The thesis of the movie is that families belong together. I watched it again this week, reading the news that Donald Trump is considering building an unregulated holding camp for migrant children, that ICE showed up on the lawn of a legal permanent resident and initiated deportation procedures, that a four-month-old baby was torn away from her breast-feeding mother. If justice is what love looks like in public, then love has started to seem like the stuff of children's movies, or maybe the stuff of this children's movie-something that doesn't make sense in the adult world, but should.

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"Coco," a Story About Borders and Love, Is a Definitive Movie for This Moment

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One weekend last fall, my boyfriend, Andrew, whose favorite movies include "Deliverance" and the original "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," went off to go see the Pixar movie "Coco," by himself, and came back in a delirium of happy, wistful tears. "What's going on with you?"

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How Pixar Made Sure ‘Coco’ Was Culturally Conscious (Published 2017)

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With a white director and a story based on a traditional Mexican holiday, the studio (mostly) pre-empted controversy through uncharacteristic collaborations.

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How (and Why) Maui Got So Big in ‘Moana’ (Published 2016)

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The Hawaiian demigod is extra large in Disney’s new animated film. His creators explain their departure from previous depictions.

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In New Zealand, a Translated ‘Moana’ Bolsters an Indigenous Language (Published 2017)

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Screenings of Disney’s “Moana” in te reo Māori, the language of the indigenous Maori, sold out quickly, bolstering efforts to keep the tongue relevant.

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Dwayne Johnson promotes "Moana" in Anaheim, Calif., in August. Johnson plays the demigod Maui in the upcoming film. (Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

The trailer for "Moana," the latest princess movie from Walt Disney Animation Studios, was shown during a commercial break for the Tony Awards telecast. With several voice actors, a screenwriter and a composer of Polynesian descent - not to mention "Hamilton" cast members Phillipa Soo and Lin-Manuel Miranda in the cast and composing music for the film, respectively - the film appeared to be in tune with the evening's progressiveness.

Still, several prominent Polynesians, including politicians, media experts and artists, have voiced discontent with one element of the film set for release in November: the depiction of Maui, a Polynesian demigod. In the film, Maui (voiced by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) accompanies the titular navigator (voiced by newcomer Auli'i Cravalho) on her journey to help her family. Maui is also prominently featured in the film's trailer.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Marie Alohalani Brown, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's department of religion who is part Hawaiian, said that, in Hawaiian mythology, Maui isn't seen as a "god" in the Judeo-Christian sense. Instead, as a "demigod," he has both godly and human characteristics, and is viewed as an ancestor to the exalted, ruling class of Hawaii. In one of Hawaii's most prominent creation myths, Maui is known for passing on the secret of fire to humans, drawing the Hawaiian archipelago together and slinging the sun so that it moves more slowly. He's a cultural hero and a trickster.

The common thrust of the criticisms is that the character is not conveyed to be strong or serious, and most complaints center on Maui's physical appearance. On June 22, Jenny Salesa, a member of New Zealand's parliament, posted a meme to her Facebook page that compared the attractiveness of three Polynesian actors (including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who voices Maui) to the "half pig half hippo" caricature of Maui in "Moana."

"When we look at photos of Polynesian men & women from the last 100-200 years, most of our people were not overweight and this negative stereotype of Maui is just not acceptable," Salesa wrote.

That same day, Samoan rugby player Eliota Fuimaono-Sapolu posted a similar meme to his Facebook page. Another critic was Will Ilolahia, from the Pacific Media Association, who described the obese-looking Maui to the Waatea News as "typical American stereotyping."

Others, however, read Maui's size in the film not as obesity, but as strength. Samoan artist Michel Mulipola posted an image to Twitter and Facebook that deconstructed the depiction of Maui and the film's other characters. "Thick build represents power and strength," he wrote in an annotation.

My lua sene on the Maui design for the Moana Disney film. Now you know and knowing is half the battle #WeAreMaui pic.twitter.com/T6T2ykGe57
- Michel Mulipola (@bloodysamoan) June 23, 2016

Of a similar opinion was Leah Damm, who wrote a piece for the Spinoff, a New Zealand online magazine, arguing that calling Disney's portrayal of Maui obese actually perpetuates the stereotype.

"The controversy about Maui's size only reinforces a very modern European concept of health and beauty," she writes. Damm also notes that the stereotype of the obese Polynesian is rooted in their "overrepresentation in poor health and mortality statistics; diabetes, heart disease, obesity," though she adds that these are largely the result of societal issues and inequalities, not poor decision-making.

But in addition to the obesity issue, several Polynesians were more broadly dissatisfied with the way in which Disney's Maui could be seen as a frivolous character, or comic relief. In contrast, Ilolahia told the Waatea News, in Polynesian folklore, Maui is "a person of strength, a person of magnitude and a person of a godly nature."

While Brown acknowledged that different Polynesian cultures have different views on Maui's characteristics, she identified one common tradition in his depiction: his intelligence. The foregoing of brains to make room for brawn and humor is likely what bothers many Polynesians, she said.

"He's not a comic figure," she said. "He's a really important political and cultural figure."

So important, in fact, that in Tongan culture, there are no images of Maui because he is so sacred.

Though Brown didn't want to comment on the film because she hadn't seen it, she expressed concerns that Disney films, and animated films more broadly, have historically conveyed and perpetuated stereotypes. She found it "regrettable" that Disney decided to transform a significant cultural figure into a cartoon.

"We need to be very careful about how we depict the marginalized. ... At what point, is entertainment free from ethics?" she said.

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Is Disney's portrayal of Maui, a Polynesian demigod, in 'Moana' culturally insensitive?

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The trailer for "Moana," the latest princess movie from Walt Disney Animation Studios, was shown during a commercial break for the Tony Awards telecast. With several voice actors, a screenwriter and a composer of Polynesian descent - not to mention "Hamilton" cast members Phillipa Soo and Lin-Manuel Miranda in the cast and composing music for the film, respectively - the film appeared to be in tune with the evening's progressiveness.

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While many are looking forward to Disney's "Moana" hitting theaters Thanksgiving weekend, some Pacific Islanders are not excited for the film. Ahead of its debut, "Moana" has become the subject of criticism from some who say it inaccurately depicts Polynesian culture and exploits it for profit.

"Through this project, Disney reached into the entire Pacific region and cherry picked here and there to create this fantasy of Polynesia," Anne Keala Kelly, a Native Hawaiian filmmaker and journalist, told NBC News. "Polynesia isn't a race and so that already is very problematic. There are millions of people in the Pacific, hundreds of languages."

"Polynesia isn't a race and so that already is very problematic. There are millions of people in the Pacific, hundreds of languages."

In preparing for "Moana," Disney created a group called the " Oceanic Story Trust" made up of academics, anthropologists, and other experts to inform the creative process. But critics have blasted the lack of transparency behind the trust.

"We don't know what the process is and it seems as if people were selected from very specific islands," Vince Diaz, a professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities with a background in Pacific Island studies, told NBC News. "Why those islands? Who gets to authenticate Polynesia and especially in a historical context in which Polynesia gets to stand for the entire Pacific?"

The film pulls cultural aspects from multiple ethnic groups in Polynesia and represents it as one culture, Diaz, who is Filipino Pohnpeian and was born in Guam, said. Though he hasn't yet seen "Moana" in its entirety, he observed in trailers the inclusion of Fijian music, Tahitian drumming, and Samoan tattoos.

One of the largest issues critics have with "Moana," they said, is that it perpetuates the stereotypical image of the Pacific as an exotic tropical getaway. They argue that it continues American colonialism of the region.

"In Hawaii, the impact of the American occupation is something nobody wants to see," Kelly said. "It's poverty, illness, diaspora, removal, marginalization, highest rates of incarceration, suicide, and on and on."
RELATED: Dance, Storytelling, and the Art of Wayfinding: Behind the Scenes of Disney's 'Moana'
"For all the bling, all the eye popping visuals, the beautiful music, amazing colors, it's the same old story of the Pacific existing to entertain, to mesmerize, to make modern humans feel good about themselves," Diaz added.

Disney did not respond to NBC News requests for comment. In October, "Moana" director John Musker told NBC News, "We spent almost three weeks going to Fiji, and to Samoa, and to Tahiti. We actually met with people really connected to the culture, their identity as the greatest navigators ever, what it was like to live in a village on an island. We tried to really absorb that kind of stuff and learn from them what their experience was."

Critics have published articles about their concerns and critiques of the film following a letter several scholars sent to Disney, Diaz said. They argued that if the company was going to appropriate Pacific culture, it should give back financially to the community.

Diaz said they did not receive a reply from the company, but after the articles , Disney announced a new scholarship program with the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund. Last month, Disney committed $500,000 for students of Asian or Pacific Islander ethnicity, which will provide 150 scholarships over a three-year period.

Critics said that's not enough.

"[It's] a pittance, given they will make billions from our cultures," Kelly said. "So even though a few students will get something out of it, it doesn't come close to the culture theft and strip mining of our genealogies."

Some hope that the film will help shine a light on the plights facing Pacific Islanders.

"Although this is an animation film about our people, I hope that there's an opportunity for us to be able to talk about the actual lives that our Pacific Islanders and especially the lives they live here in this country," 'Alisi Tulua, chief operating officer of non-profit organization Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, told NBC News. "And maybe their lives they live back in the islands, the types of issues they're facing there."

"For all the bling, all the eye popping visuals, the beautiful music, amazing colors, it's the same old story of the Pacific existing to entertain, to mesmerize, to make modern humans feel good about themselves."

Diaz hopes that through "Moana," people might understand that there is a problem with the narrative of the Pacific.

"If we're successful, we can show just what's problematic about so called benevolent narratives and images," he said. "All that glitters is not gold. It's highly seductive, but the more seductive something is, the more you better be vigilant about how its power operates. The trick is about demonstrating how this benevolent narrative and iconography of the Pacific is actually insidious in how it advances and perpetuates colonialism."
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Critics accuse Disney of 'culture theft' ahead of 'Moana' release

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While many are looking forward to Disney's "Moana" hitting theaters Thanksgiving weekend, some Pacific Islanders are not excited for the film. Ahead of its debut, "Moana" has become the subject of criticism from some who say it inaccurately depicts Polynesian culture and exploits it for profit.

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Moana is the daughter of a chief and will someday inherit her father's position, but she's furious when Maui, a tattooed, muscle-bound demigod, calls her a princess. Moana (MWAH-nah) is not only part of a dynastic line but also a girl off on an adventure in the company of a cute animal sidekick (a dimwitted chicken named Heihei). So not just any princess, in other words: a Disney princess. She may be on a quest to save her island and restore ecological balance to the planet, but Moana (voiced by Auli'i Cravalho) is also upholding a brand.

It is, as these things go, a pretty good brand. The Disney princess tradition has held onto its charm as it has changed with the times, widening its cultural frame of reference and allowing its heroines to travel down paths other than the one leading straight to matrimony. Moana, bantering with Maui ( Dwayne Johnson) like a rival sibling and borne on her journey by the spirits of the ocean and her grandmother (Rachel House), has no need of a prince.

In the Disney kingdom, the in-house influence of Pixar has reinvigorated the animation (though some of us may still pine for the classic, painterly Disney visual aesthetic), and the rejuvenation of American musical theater has provided a fresh pool of songwriting talent. "Moana," directed by Ron Clements and John Musker from a screenplay by Jared Bush, includes a few infectious numbers by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a heart-tugging orchestral pop score by the Disney stalwart Mark Mancina. Buoyant songs by the Polynesian singer and composer Opetaia Foa'i (performed with his band Te Vaka) anchor the film's cheery globalism in a specific South Pacific milieu.

The plot is similarly syncretic, a mélange of updated folklore, contemporary eco-spiritualism and tried-and-true Disney-Pixar formula. Heihei, who beats out an adorable pig for the job of cute animal sidekick on the voyage itself, is a lot like Becky, the addled loon in "Finding Dory." And the first part of the story, in which Moana's anxious, protective father tries to keep his daughter from venturing beyond the reef that encircles their island, is a ringing echo of "Finding Nemo."

Once an ecological catastrophe (and her grandmother's example) persuade Moana to defy her dad, she must overcome her own doubts (and Maui's skepticism) and prove herself through a series of ordeals. Unlike "Frozen," which spiked the formula with genuine surprise, "Moana" unfolds more or less as expected. Which is just fine, really. Archetypes are there for a reason: to provide reassurance and encouragement amid the squall and uncertainty of life.

There are some touching and amusing zigzags on the way to the film's sweet and affirmative conclusion. Moana inhabits a bright world of water and sunshine, into which the filmmakers insert a handful of visual and musical showstoppers. The best of these is probably a glam-rock pastiche called "Shiny," performed by Jemaine Clement in the guise of a greedy giant crab. Mr. Miranda's motor-mouthed synthesis of hip-hop and show-tune traditions provides jolts of energy and wit, matched by some clever bits of animation. Maui's tattoos come to life, making his body an inky comic strip within the film's splashy, colorful cartoon world.

And, as usual, you succumb to an enjoyable experience that splits the difference between mythology and merchandising. Moana is an inspiring heroine, a smart, brave and decent young woman whose individual aspirations align perfectly with a larger, world-saving mission. She is also an exuberant and appealing self-marketer, whose likeness will proliferate on school bags and under Christmas trees for a long time to come.

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Review: 'Moana,' Brave Princess on a Voyage With a Chicken

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Moana is the daughter of a chief and will someday inherit her father's position, but she's furious when Maui, a tattooed, muscle-bound demigod, calls her a princess. Moana (MWAH-nah) is not only part of a dynastic line but also a girl off on an adventure in the company of a cute animal sidekick (a dimwitted chicken named Heihei).

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The Times critic A.O. Scott reviews “Moana.”

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Opinion | The Supersize Cliché in ‘Moana’ (Published 2016)

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A new Disney animated movie is careful to get a lot of things right about Pacific islanders, but one obvious stereotype has crept in.

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It was through these visits that they began to form "the Oceanic Story Trust," which is kind of like the Pixar brain trust for this story, but instead in charge of ensuring the people of the region were depicted authentically. Polynesia is a region that has been misrepresented in the media, and they wanted to make sure that doesn't happen with this movie. They would not only fact check any story beat, but almost every aspect of the film from the music to costumes.

The Oceanic Story Trust consists of people from many walks of life. They're academics, archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians. But also tattoo masters and navigators and fishermen and elders, artists. They shared their knowledge and stories with the production and were available to the filmmakers and crew for questions throughout the process.

Every name in the movie either comes from or was approved by the Oceanic Story Trust. Moana's name means "of the sea." Every draft of the script, every little change, was sent to the Oceanic Story Trust to vet. Because the South Pacific is one big atmosphere, there are shared words that sometimes have negative connotations in different regions. Screenwriter Jared Bush says that "sometimes they'd say like 'oh, you can't do that.'"

Or they'd say like, I can see you guys trying to be safe. You don't have to be that safe with this. So it was definitely this great conversation. There was a few times where we were recording Dwayne Johnson in Atlanta and there was one bit of dialogue that wasn't working correctly, but it had to be vetted, so I was literally emailing with Paul who was in Fiji, Aaron and Jordan, two other writers that were in Hawaii, and we're all sort of doing this and going back and forth and finally we all agreed on one thing and then I walked in and Dwayne recorded that line five seconds later. But we're having the conversation all around the world in that one moment, which is pretty fantastic.

They were very particular about all details of the film. For instance, even Moana's clothes were made from materials and using designs that would have been made 2,000 years ago. Red colors have a significance to the Pacific islanders, meaning royalty, so they reserved those colors for a ceremonial costume.

They had to redo hundreds of crowd costumes in a sequence because one of the trust experts informed them that you would never go on a boat in that particular kind of costume, even though the wardrobe is accurate to the time period and area.

There were no surviving ships from 2,000 years ago so they based the vehicles on the oldest boats preserved from the region only few hundred years ago. They also tried to imagine how the boats would have functioned based on marine technology from that time period. They based the style on Fijian-style boats because research showed them that the ships that came to the island would have probably been from elsewhere.

A bunch of the animation crew working on the movie also have South Pacific roots. Story artist David Derrick came to the studio to work on this project because he was of Samoan ancestry and it was very personal to him.

The first thing I did is I went out to the gravesite of my first Samoan ancestor who came from America and I did a rubbing of her gravesite. And I had that above my desk every single day that I was working on it. As a reminder why I'm making this, why I'm working so hard. It's really to celebrate and honor a powerful culture. They have the largest atmosphere of any culture prior to Western expansion. People don't realize that. But they were able to navigate from Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawaii to Samoa all without instruments. Just with the art of way finding. They have an incredible culture that I am so proud that we are honoring.

Derrick was able to sneak in his family's tapa into the movie in the background of a scene - Moana walks past women holding the tapestry while singing a song while walking through the village.

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How Disney Formed The Oceanic Story Trust To Make 'Moana' More Authentic - /Film

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It was through these visits that they began to form "the Oceanic Story Trust," which is kind of like the Pixar brain trust for this story, but instead in charge of ensuring the people of the region were depicted authentically.

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Disney's animated hit movie Moana is getting a live-action remake, the company announced Monday.

The new version of the 2016 movie is under development, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who played the character Maui, said in a video.

"It's still very early in the process," he said. "There's so much more work to be done."

Moana, which is based on Pacific Islander cultures, is centered around "an adventurous teenager who, with help from demigod Maui...sails out on a daring mission to prove herself a master wayfinder and save her people," according to Disney.

Johnson, whose mother is Samoan, will be a producer on the upcoming movie and will reprise his role as Maui, who was inspired by Johnson's late grandfather, High Chief Peter Maivia.

"I'm deeply humbled and overcome with gratitude to bring the beautiful story of Moana to the live-action big screen," he said. "This story is my culture, and this story is emblematic of our people's grace and warrior strength."

Auli'i Cravalho, who is Hawaiian and voiced the titular character, said Moana "has had such a profound impact on how we think of Disney princesses. Moana's strength and perseverance are inspiring-to audiences around the world, to me, and to everyone who helped bring her to life. I'm looking forward to sharing her story in a whole new way."

Cravalho will also be an executive producer on the project.

Disney said Moana grossed almost $644 million at the box office globally and was nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. Its soundtrack won a Grammy and Billboard Music Award.

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Hit animated film 'Moana' will receive a live-action remake, Disney announced

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Disney's animated hit movie Moana is getting a live-action remake, the company announced Monday. The new version of the 2016 movie is under development, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who played the character Maui, said in a video. "It's still very early in the process," he said. "There's so much more work to be done."

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