Coco an emotional, spiritual journey

Miguel enters the Land of the Dead in Coco. Image courtesy Disney.

Coco is the darkest movie in Pixar history. Pixar has a knack for diving into some dark and sad territory, but this is the first time the company has centered its story on death. This story is literally about spirits and aging and the ever present thought of mortality. Pixar, being Pixar, translates a story about death into a visually-stunning, family-oriented, crowd-pleasing musical rife with joy and a few lessons for everyone. (Except the bad guy, whose moral retribution is among the most dreadful in Disney's long history of making the villains pay for their transgressions.)

At stake in Coco is both life and eternal life. The life of the precocious but impetuous Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) is the most trenchant threat the movie has to offer, given the fear of dying at a young age is about as close to a universal horror as it gets for Coco’s young target audience. More existentially horrifying is the death that comes after death, as the spirit Héctor (Gael García Bernal) describes to Miguel after watching the already dead dissolve away into nothing. All life effectively ends once the world has forgotten about you, the memory imprinted into others is the flickering candle that keeps the souls fresh in the Land of the Dead. Death is inevitable, but a second death caused by the world forgetting you, and knowing that is exactly how one is fading toward oblivion, is terrifying and inevitable. Coco attempts to cover the darkness of its subject matter with what is a gorgeous depiction of the Land of the Dead. What could be shown as a dark and morbid place is depicted instead as a lively city light brightly and festooned with garish lights and lots of light hues, showing how the denizens of the Land of the Dead haven’t lost their humanity.

And yet, this is still a movie about an impossible to know subject explained to children with little cognizance of what death actually means. Coco resides in a very dark place for a Pixar film, putting its child protagonist at risk of a premature entry into the Land of the Dead from the start of act two. The film gives its young character an easy out by requesting forgiveness from long-dead matriarch Mamá Imelda (Alanna Ubach), under the condition Miguel abandons his love for music and adopts his family's shoemaker life. Miguel actively resists his dead family's help and instead searches for  guitar legend Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt) for absolution, preferring the possibility of death over the death of his passion. It's a headstrong and dangerous choice, albeit one the movie doesn't fault him for either. It's a Pixar tradition to have complicated moral lessons, never quite showing one side of an argument to be more right than the other. There are shades of correctness, areas in which compromise between the warring parties should take precedence because of their shared bond. A lesson is learned by all, but everyone learns their own lesson to reach the important middle ground. The problem, at least for Coco, is the plot machinations to get to those points is a little sloppy, even granted the relative lower bar set for animated movies (and the expository nature of musicals). The lessons are a little too easy to figure out for the characters, the journey toward self discovery a little too convenient. One of the major plot points is telegraphed in a manner that remains inexplicable, relying on a character making an incredibly dumb admission of guilt in a fictional format. The narrative can’t be this pointed to work as effectively as it could; being too blunt about the process lessens the effect of the lesson shared to the character, and to the audience as well.

It’s a frustrating problem, but forgivable for how wonderful the rest of the movie is. Coco is really, really easy to get lost to, the visuals complementing the music, which adds brightness to the morbid story. This movie is a reminder of what Pixar is capable of when it isn't chasing Cars money, providing joyous and heartfelt viewing experiences for children and adults. It's hard not to bob one's head along to the addicting songs and laugh at the gallows humor and enjoy Miguel’s family run by his Abuelita (Renee Victor). And it's especially hard not to sob uncontrollably in the third act when Miguel plays a heart-wrenching song to his great grandmother, the eponymous Coco. The build up to that moment is brilliant, the moment plays out gorgeously, and the movie earns every tear that will cascade from your eyes.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 109 minutes

Genre: Animation

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Target audience: Families and Pixar junkies.

Take the whole family?: Coco is appropriately morbid given the subject matter, but it's bright enough to not scare off kids much younger than 7.

Theater or Netflix?: Totally worth watching it in theaters with the kids, especially after a long day of Black Friday shopping.

How's the soundtrack?: Pretty great, actually. Inspired by the Mexican milieu and its themes of memory, the music oscillates between fun and cheerful to mournful and heartbreaking. They're catchy, but in a quality way that doesn't make replaying the music for two days straight feel regrettable.

Watch this as well?: Most of the Pixar library is some variation of good to excellent. This one fits alongside Inside Out and Up in the break your heart category.

Cars 3 missing ambition, heart

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo) in Cars 3. Image courtesy Disney.

Every time I write a review of a Pixar movie I hit up YouTube to watch clips from the older movies the company has made. It is a form of procrastination, but the clips do result in some inspiration from the wonders the company has produced over the years, or at the least cause me to sob uncontrollably (the opening to Up always gets me). Unfortunately, it's beginning to serve more of a trip down memory lane for when Pixar made great movies. Aside from the wonderful Inside Out, Pixar hasn't made a movie that qualifies as pretty good in about five years. Based on Cars 3, it's becoming more and more common to see exceptional movies like Inside Out be outliers, not standards.

To state it early on, Cars 3 is not a bad movie. The animation remains top notch, the racing scenes are effectively cool and engaging, and just enough of the jokes land to result in a few chuckles from kids in the audience. That, though, isn't Pixar. The company makes legendary animated movies that hit the soul like a hammer or captivate viewers with their sense of humor and great characters. At least, that's how it was for a rather long time. Then Cars came out and started to muddy Pixar's reputation. A wave of sequels to other movies started to drizzle out, some to fantastic (Toy Story 3), a couple to middling (Finding Dory) and at least one to dreadful (Cars 2) results. What's left now is the blend of the two, a third Cars movie a step below Finding Dory and mediocre enough to ask if Pixar has anything left in the tank.

What ultimately sinks Cars 3 is cynicism. This movie is designed to be a cash grab, offering little underneath the glossy patina to digest, or at least remember. Most movies are created to earn some level of profit – whether it be box office sales or merchandise – yet it remains disheartening how much of the focus for this movie is on the toys it'll sell in lieu of telling a solid, satisfactory story. It's particularly weird for this movie considering how much Lightning McQueen (voiced again by Owen Wilson) complains about becoming an empty mascot with little redeeming value beyond a brand name, protesting against the fate of his character in real life to no effect. The continued existence of the Larry the Cable Guy voiced Mater is proof enough that profit outshines creative ambition.

The push away from being a corporate shill is one of many, many messages a person could take out of Cars 3. That the writers undercut that a bit by also praising certain products featuring Lightning McQueen fits the loose moral center that guides this movie. The whole movie has this loose vibe, with plots that don’t go far enough to justify audience engagement or interest. It doesn't really matter that Lightning is intimidated by the fast new racer (Armie Hammer), or annoyed by the young trainer (Cristela Alonzo) who failed at her one shot at being a racer, or seeks life advice from the wise old truck (Chris Cooper) that taught his mentor, or discomfited by the materialistic company owner (Nathan Fillion). None of these plots are fleshed out enough to be interesting in and of themselves, and throwing them all together succeeds only at pushing the run time beyond any level of justification. The only theme that is tracked from beginning to end is McQueen's fear of getting old, which spurs him to try new training methods before giving up and reverting back to what he did before to spite the Moneyball-esque analysis that has apparently taken the love out of the sport.

What it adds up to is Trouble with the Curve mixed with Rocky IV mixed again with whatever racing movie or even feel good sports movie filled with clichés easily anticipated twists you've ever seen. Cars 3 is remarkable for its narrative laziness, and it's just boring watching Cars 3 because the expectations are planted early on and the big twists foretold with little subtlety. Even the themes are outlined blatantly by some awkwardly obvious song choices and bits of clunky expositional dialog. And, honestly, what's the point of watching a movie like this if it doesn't offer anything that hasn't already been done before? It'll keep the kids moderately entertained for nearly two hours, but that's the expectation for movies from lesser studios like Illumination, not one as great as Pixar.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: G

Run time: 109 minutes

Genre: Animated

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Target audience: Kids for sure, and along with parents trying to keep their kids occupied for nearly two hours.

Take the whole family?: Nothing too scary or intimidating about this one. Aside from a far too long run time, this is fine for all ages.

Theater or Netflix?: Matinee if you must.

How's the short film?: Really quite charming, if a little strange. Called Lou, the short about a sentient collect of lost and found items that sort of torments a child to be decent is sweet in its own way and often pretty funny. At the least it is far more interesting than the featured attraction.

Watch this as well?: Pick just about any Pixar movie unrelated to the Cars franchise and you'll get some entertainment out of it (along with lots upon lots of tears). For adults, this movie has a lot of parallels to the very strange but fun Will Ferrell racing flick Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

'Dory' frolics in the kiddie pool

Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) and Hank (Ed O'Neill) in Finding Dory. Image courtesy Pixar.

The simplest way to evaluate a Pixar film is to see if it has at least one moment that breaks your heart asunder. Pixar as a studio is reliable enough to produce consistently entertaining films (a Cars or two aside), but the great ones it creates possess an emotional heft that cuts right into the soul resulting in uncontrollable weeping. It serves as a dividing line between the studio's best films – Toy Story series, Wall-E, Up, Finding Nemo and last year's tremendous Inside Out – and the still wicked to very good but not quite as emotionally charged movies like The Incredibles, Brave, Ratatouille, and A Bug's Life. There are a couple of moments in which Finding Dory flirts with the hurting, coming ever so close to breaking down the audience but never quite reaching its main objective. As a film, and pardon the pun,  Finding Dory stays much closer to the surface than its indelible predecessor; a lighter, simpler quest befitting the titular fish, Dory (voiced again by Ellen DeGeneres). The logic of the decision makes sense, yet the result is a less than stellar follow-up, a good enough film that can't come close to living up to the majesty of Finding Nemo.

Good enough feels a little mean of a descriptor for Finding Dory, which has a fair number of positives working in its favor. It retains much of the original's visual splendor and creates an incredible undersea world the audience can still get lost in. The film is also quite funny, especially a frantic slow-motion scene toward the end and a recurring gag concerning a very famous science fiction actress. For all intents and purposes, Finding Dory is a quality piece of children's entertainment that will keep the kids focused for almost two hours (including the short film in the beginning).

And yet the expectations for a Pixar film are much higher than the average animated flick, giving poor Finding Dory a precedent it isn't designed to meet. This is the safer version of Finding Nemo in which the characters aren't chased by a relapsing shark (there's a squid, but it's not the same) or swallowed by a whale or have to fake death to escape (just mild illness). Even the locale changes, moving out of the ocean and into a marine life institute with a heavier human presence than the original. Dory, Marlin (an underused Albert Brooks), and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) never face an insurmountable or even life threatening challenge beyond the aforementioned squid; it's as if the filmmakers, including franchise director Andrew Stanton, wanted to take the sting away and have a pleasant and nice film. Pleasant and nice is a very fine thing to aim for if you want to earn a profit; it's a terrible strategy for creating art.

The lightness of being is a little odd given the film’s rather bold and interesting premise, in which Dory searches through her scattered memory for her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy) she lost years ago. That's a hell of a premise to work from with the potential to ask questions about identity, family, and even the trustworthiness of memory in the first place; even the title hints at a rather solid self-examination of the soul. Finding Dory doesn't fall into the philosophical premise it sets up for itself; rather, it seems happier to peek into the abyss than to dive right into the moral ambiguity its presence sets up. What viewers get instead is a few new characters to know, like cantankerous octopus Hank (Ed O'Neill) who effectively replaces Marlin for much of the film, along with a pair of helpful whales (Kaitlin Olson and Ty Burrell) who are a bit fun to have around but lack distinction and their own agency. This isn't a situation like in the first film in which the secondary characters work along with some combination of Nemo, Marlin and Dory to attain their end goal. Instead, the side characters either barter for their objectives our assist for the sake of helping. They're used less as characters and more as plot points.

This is all a very long way of saying Finding Dory is missing the heart, charm and curiosity that defined Finding Nemo. It doesn't have the courage to invest in its characters at the same level and make audiences truly feel for their fates and hope they escape their quasi-imprisonment. Most troublesome is this film won't break you down and rip the soul out of your heart like it should; it's more content to offer an unenthusiastic friendly hug.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 97 minute

Genre: Animated

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Target audience: Families and people who have Pixar devotees.

Take the whole family?: This one's even tamer than the original, so feel free to take even the youngest kids along with you.

Theater or Netflix?: Even if the film itself isn't great, the animation is, as always, superb. That's enough in my book to warrant a theater trip, although don't pay for the 3D unless you go to a matinee screening.

How's the short film?: Pretty freaking adorable. Called Piper, the short focuses on a young sandpiper learning to fetch its own food with rather calamitous results. While it lacks the depth of last year's Sanjay's Super Team, Piper is a fun, cute little prelude to the main feature.

Watch this as well?: As if you won't buy, rent or dig out your copy of Finding Nemo and watch it again. Remember, fish are friends, not food.

Going back to home on the range

Spot and Arlo in a scene from "The Good Dinosaur." Image courtesy Disney/Pixar.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the “The Good Dinosaur” is a thought experiment in which viewers try to figure out what the differences are between a human and dinosaur dominated society. Per the filmmakers, agriculture is an evolutionary inevitability, as are domesticity, drug trips, speech, and the development of morals and ethics among a civilized society. Humans wear items related to clothing, although it appears to be designed for preserving a creature's modesty as it does for warmth and protection. On the whole, much of the dinosaur society is like that of that early humans, if just a hint off, just as the film itself is a bit off and a rather interesting letdown.

Like the famous line by T.S. Eliot, The Good Dinosaur” opens with a whimper, or at least a shooting star that would have caused the destruction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, according to the text on screen. Jump to a few million years into the future and dinosaurs have evolved into a lifestyle akin to those found in westerns. For little Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), that means life as a corn farmer in a small valley with his Poppa (Jeffrey Wright), Momma (Frances McDormand), sister Libby and brother Buck (Marcus Scribner). Poor Arlo is a neurotic runt, afraid of the chickens he feeds and the bugs that swarm around his head and the little humanoid creature (later named Spot and voiced by Jack Bright) consuming the family's crops. Poppa doesn't take kindly to the last act and uses it as a chance to coax the fear out of his young son, a choice that results in the older dinosaurs untimely, strikingly familiar death.

Arlo blames the little human for his father's death, and an opportunity to partake in revenge against the little moppet goes awry, sending the little dino miles away from his home. Stuck with the devoted and effective human as his only companion, Arlo must navigate through the unknown to find his way home. The trip is fraught with peril, as the weather, dangerous scavengers (notably a group of fearless pterodactyls led by Steve Zahn's Thunderclap) fear and self doubt combine to keep Arlo from reaching his goals. But the dude is resourceful, and he has a habit of striking up unconventional friendships, including a family of Tyrannosaurus rex rustlers voiced by Anna Paquin, A.J. Buckley and the silver-voiced Sam Elliott who offer comfort, advice and a little direction for the dino boy and his dog.

If certain segments of that description feel familiar, it's because “The Good Dinosaur,” to its detriment, is influenced greatly by other Disney-related properties, most notably “The Lion King.” “The Good Dinosaur” lifts a lot from the non-Shakespearean bits from “The Lion King,” like the death scene alluded to earlier and the mythical visitation of the father figure as a point of self discovery, which wouldn't be as big of a problem if it had a stronger narrative arc for its characters. That's not something the film opts to invest in – due in part to the heavy western influence that runs through it – and the haphazard story is uneven and is weighted to make the second act something of a bore. The plotting is one of the little things that just makes “The Good Dinosaur” a little off among its Pixar brethren: The story is a little sparse, the characters a little flat, the humor a little scatter shot, the speed of the action a little slow.  

But “The Good Dinosaur” is still a Pixar film, and it has enough of those core elements coursing through it to keep it an entertaining disappointment. The movie is quite often magnificent as a spectacle, just a beautiful film with open landscapes befitting its western roots and a pair of sequences involving fireflies that is just a wonder to watch unfold. And the loose plotting offers benefits of its own thanks the time extra spent with Arlo and Spot, who engage in silly antics and romp about the forest with whimsy and comfort. Getting that bond solidified results in an emotionally heavy scene that will wreck a few audience members, matching the minimum requirement for every good-to-great Pixar film.

I think the best way to think about “The Good Dinosaur” is to see it as an experiment for the studio, a new way of storytelling that’s simple and less frenetic than other films. The fact the film doesn’t work as well as it could is almost secondary to what it could lead to; like a pitcher developing an off-speed pitch to expand his or her repertoire, the new variation could become magnificent with more practice.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 100 minutes

Genre: Animated

Ask Away

Target audience: Pixar fanatics and parents who need a break in between shopping trips.

Take the whole family?: Good for almost all age groups, save toddlers who will get a little intimidated by the more violent scenes.

Theater or Netflix?: Might be a nice way to keep the kids distracted during Black Friday shopping, but don't spring for the 3-D glasses.

What about the animated short?: It was actually the highlight of the screening. The short, “Sanjay's Super Team,” is about how a boy learns to understand his faith through the power of imagination and super heroes. Few words are spoken, but the tenderness and brilliant animation are awesome, as well as the idea of interpreting religion through one's own lens.

Watch this as well?: Pick your Pixar flick, especially the wonderful “”Inside Out.” Beyond that, the original “Land Before Time” is a rather good little animated films about how beings define family and the importance of conquering fear, just like “The Good Dinosaur.”