The Animation Freak. Pixar's Coco.

 

                                      The Animation Freak.  

                                            

                                             Pixar's Coco. 

First off I don't know if Pixar give credit to María de la Salud Ramírez Caballero, "Mama Coco", for being the inspiration for the character in this film, if not they should cause it is obvious that she was the model. 

There are so many reasons to love this film but the one that I love the most is how beautiful and amazing the Hispanic community and the people are, every character fit so great together, the story, the animation, the music, the backgrounds, it is just so amazingly beautiful. I have always liked the Hispanic culture and this film makes me love it even more. I can't thank everyone who made this film enough for their work, they are so amazingly talented and hope they keep making more films like Coco. Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, Ana Ramírez González, and so many, many more amazing people. 

In Santa Cecilia, Mexico, Miguel dreams of becoming a musician, even though his family strictly forbids it. His great-great-grandmother Imelda was married to a man who left her and their daughter Coco to pursue a career in music, and when he never returned, Imelda banished music from her family's life before starting a shoemaking business.

Miguel now lives with the elderly Coco and their family, including Miguel's parents and his abuelita, who are all shoemakers. He secretly idolizes Ernesto de la Cruz, a famous musician who died decades earlier, and teaches himself to play guitar from Ernesto's old films. On the Day of the Dead, Miguel accidentally damages the picture frame that holds a photo of Coco with her mother on the family ofrenda, discovering that a hidden section of the photograph shows his great-great-grandfather holding Ernesto's famous guitar. Concluding that Ernesto is his great-great-grandfather, an inspired Miguel leaves to enter a talent show for Day of the Dead despite his family's objections.

Breaking into Ernesto's mausoleum, Miguel takes his guitar to use in the show, but once he strums it, he becomes invisible to everyone in the village plaza. However, he can interact with his skeletal dead relatives, who are visiting from the Land of the Dead for the holiday. Taking him back with them, they learn that Imelda cannot visit, since Miguel accidentally removed her photo from the ofrenda. Miguel discovers that he is cursed for stealing from the dead, and must return to the Land of the Living before sunrise, or he will become one of the dead; to do so, he must receive a blessing from a member of his family. Imelda offers Miguel a blessing on the condition he end his dream of becoming a musician, but Miguel refuses and resolves to seek Ernesto's blessing instead. He meets Héctor, who declares that he knows Ernesto, offering to help him reach him in return for Miguel taking his photo back with him, so that he might visit his daughter before she forgets him, causing him to disappear completely. Héctor helps Miguel enter a talent competition to win entry to Ernesto's mansion, but Miguel's family tracks him down, forcing him to flee.

Miguel sneaks into the mansion, where Ernesto welcomes him as his descendant, but Héctor confronts them, again imploring Miguel to take his photo to the Land of the Living. Ernesto and Héctor renew an argument from their partnership in life, and Miguel realizes that when Héctor decided to leave the duo to return to his family, Ernesto poisoned him, then stole his guitar along with his songs, passing them off as his own to become famous. To protect his legacy, Ernesto seizes the photo and has his security guards throw Miguel and Héctor into a cenote pit. There, Miguel realizes that Héctor is his real great-great-grandfather, and that Coco is Héctor's daughter.

After Imelda and the family rescue the duo, Miguel reveals the truth about Héctor's death. Imelda and Héctor reconcile, and the family infiltrates Ernesto's concert to retrieve Héctor's photo. Ernesto's crimes are exposed to the audience, who jeer at him as he is thrown out of the stadium, then crushed by a giant bell in the same manner that he originally died. In the chaos, however, Héctor's photograph is lost. As the sun rises, Coco's life and memory are fading; Imelda and Héctor bless Miguel, so that he can return to the Land of the Living. After Miguel plays "Remember Me", Coco brightens and sings along with Miguel. She reveals that she had saved the torn-off piece of the family photo with Héctor's face on it, then tells her family stories about her father, thus saving his memory as well as his existence in the Land of the Dead. Miguel's family reconciles with him, ending the ban on music.

One year later, Miguel presents the family ofrenda, which now includes the deceased Coco to his new baby sister Socorro. Coco's collected letters from Héctor prove that Ernesto stole his songs, destroying Ernesto's legacy and allowing Héctor to be rightfully honored in his place. In the Land of the Dead, Héctor and Imelda rekindle their romance, joining Coco and the rest of their family for a visit to the living, where Miguel in a mariachi costume sings and plays for his relatives, both living and dead.

On April 13, 2016, Unkrich announced that they had begun work on the animation. The film's writer, Adrian Molina, was promoted to co-director in late 2016. Unkrich said that Pixar wanted "to have as much contrast between" the Land of the Living and the Land of the Dead and that many techniques were used to differentiate the worlds. Color was one: "Given the holiday and the iconography, Pixar knew the Land of the Dead had to be a visually vibrant and colorful place, so they deliberately designed Santa Cecilia to be more muted" said Unkrich.

According to Harley Jessup, the film's production designer, Santa Cecilia is based on real Mexican villages, as the production team "stayed grounded in reality in the Land of the Living". Chris Bernardi, the film's set supervisor, said that the town was made small so Miguel could feel confined. Bert Berry, the film's art director, said that aged building materials were used to depict Santa Cecilia "as an older charming city". According to Unkrich, Miguel's guitar playing is authentic, as they "videotaped musicians playing each song or melody and strapped GoPros on their guitars" to use as a reference. For the scene in which Miguel plays music in his secret hideout, the filmmakers used "very elegant, lyrical camera moves" and "gentle drifts and slow arcing moves around Miguel as he plays his guitar with very shallow depth of field to enhance the beauty of the soft-focus foreground candles".

Christian Hoffman, the film's character supervisor, said that all of the details in Mama Coco's face were not modeled. Instead, his team used special software to design separate layers of detail, which were then added to her face with a shader. The character's model was made with higher resolution to get all the wrinkles right, according to Hoffman. Pixar used some Xolo dogs to use as reference for the character Dante, while a tentacle from Finding Dory's Hank was used for his tongue.

Jessup called the Marigold petal bridge that connects both worlds "elegant and magical". Michael K. O'Brien, the film's effects supervisor, called it "a huge technical challenge" for the animation team, but referred to it as something "so visually exciting with petals dripping from it; it was a massive artistic undertaking. The production team wanted it to glow — to feel alive". The scenes in which Miguel takes a few petals off of the bridge and in which Hector sinks into the bridge were given more effects and special art direction.

For the Land of the Dead, Unkrich did not want "to have just a free-for-all, wacky world", wanting instead to add logic and be "ever-expanding because new residents would arrive regularly". Jessup said that the animation team wanted the Land of the Dead "to be a vibrant explosion of color" when Miguel arrives. Jessup also said that "Lee Unkrich described a vertical world of towers, contrasting with the flatness of Santa Cecilia. The lights and reflections are dazzling and there's a crazy transportation system that connects it all. The costume colors are much more vibrant than in the Land of the Living, where [the animation team] tried to stay grounded in reality. They really went all out in the Land of the Dead to make it a reflection of the holiday". According to David Ryu, the film's supervising technical director, the animation team "figured out a way to introduce a single light — but give it a million points" for the scenes on the outside in the Land of the Dead: "The renderer sees it as one light, but we see a million lights".

According to art director Daniel Arraiga, the animators "had to figure out how to give the skeletons personality without skin, muscles, noses or even lips" and that they "played with shapes and did a lot of paintings. They sculpted and studied skulls from every angle to figure out where they could add appeal and charm". Global technology supervisor J.D. Northrup was hired early in the film's production in order to avoid potential issues in the film's animation process. Northrup said that "Each of the skeletons' pieces had to be independent so the complexity of the rig and the stress that it puts on the pipeline were something like we've never seen before." Northrup was also tasked with simplifying the skeleton's elements to render the skeleton crowds. In order to create the skeletons, several additional controls were used, as they "needed to move in ways that humans don't," according to character modeling and articulation lead Michael Honse. Honse said that the bones were a particular problem, stating that "there was a lot of back-and-forth with animation to get it right," but found "really cool ways" to move the skeletons.

Unkrich found writing the script "the toughest nut to crack". Earlier versions of the film had different universe rules regarding how Miguel (originally called Marco) would get back from the land of the dead; in one case he physically had to run across the bridge. In one version of the story, his family is cursed with singing when trying to speak, which was included as a technique to add music to a story where music is banned.

Lee Unkrich first pitched an idea for the film in 2010, when Toy Story 3, which he also directed, was released. Initially the film was to be about an American child, learning about his Mexican heritage, while dealing with the death of his mother. Eventually, the team decided that this was the wrong approach and reformed the film to focus on a Mexican child instead. Of the original version, Unkrich noted that it "reflected the fact that none of us at the time were from Mexico." The fact that the film depicted "a real culture" caused anxiety for Unkrich, who "felt an enormous responsibility on his shoulders to do it right."

The Pixar team made several trips to Mexico to help define the characters and story of Coco. Unkrich said, "I'd seen it portrayed in folk art. It was something about the juxtaposition of skeletons with bright, festive colors that captured my imagination. It has led me down a winding path of discovery. And the more I learn about [el] Día de los Muertos, the more it affects me deeply." The team found it difficult working with skeletal creatures, as they lacked any muscular system, and as such had to be animated differently from their human counterparts. Coco also took inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki's anime films Spirited Away (2001) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004) as well as the action film John Wick (2014).

In 2013, Disney made a request to trademark the phrase "Día de los Muertos" for merchandising applications. This was met with criticism from the Mexican American community in the United States. Lalo Alcaraz, a Mexican-American cartoonist, drew a film poster titled Muerto Mouse, depicting a skeletal Godzilla-sized Mickey Mouse with the byline "It's coming to trademark your cultura." More than 21,000 people signed a petition on Change.org stating that the trademark was "cultural appropriation and exploitation at its worst". A week later, Disney canceled the attempt, with the official statement saying that the "trademark filing was intended to protect any title for our film and related activities. It has since been determined that the title of the film will change, and therefore we are withdrawing our trademark filing." In 2015, Pixar hired Alcaraz to consult on the film, joining playwright Octavio Solis and former CEO of the Mexican Heritage Corp. Marcela Davison Aviles, to form a cultural consultant group.

Controversy behind this beautiful film. 

In 2018, news outlets discovered that Disney Pixar had failed to disclose that producers for Coco had based the character of "Mama Coco" on María de la Salud Ramírez Caballero from the Purépecha village of Santa Fe de la Laguna, "a town of Purépecha potters in Quiroga, Michoacán." In a news interview, Salud stated that the producers "offered me so many things, but nothing came of it. They only came and took my picture and took it with them. They asked me what I need. Well, look at how I live and alone. My daughters live here, behind the house. And I'm here alone, that's what I have." In a report by Telemundo, residents and artisans of Santa Fe da la Laguna recognized that the attention Salud has received by people throughout the world has increased tourism for the town. Gabriela Gabriel Fabián, a potter of the town, noted that "It has benefited us because many more tourists come. This town is known because of the lady's fame, they buy our artwork, everything we do and figures of her."

While the production team at Disney Pixar have recognized that they "based the Rivera family – a multigenerational matriarchy headed by Miguel's formidable grandmother – on real-world families with whom they embedded while visiting the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guanajuato between 2011 and 2013," they have not acknowledged Salud's contribution to the film. Co-director Adrian Molina stated, "not only is Coco based in a real place, in Mexico, but it's based in real traditions, so we knew it was very important to do the research, to get every detail recorded, so that when we get back to Pixar and we start deciding what is this town going to look like, what is this grandmother going to wear, what kind of dancing and music are they going to listen to, it can all come from an informed place." However, Salud remains unmentioned in all reports Disney Pixar have made regarding inspiration for the film.

Salud reported that since the release of the film, many people, even internationally, have visited her and will refer to her as "Mama Coco." In response, she replied, "Yes, but ["Mama Coco's"] not my name. The producers chose that name. And now all the people who come and visit tell us that's my name. But I tell them no, it's not my name. My name is María de la Salud." Prior to the film's release, Salud was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and now she has to use oxygen tanks to breathe. The family however has expressed that they "aren't looking to receive royalties, or money, despite her grandmother's need to recharge her oxygen tank every two days." They are, however, asking "that the company acknowledge her contribution" to the film, which has yet to occur.