“After working on it for about a year, we realized we were telling a story with antithetical themes to what Día de Muertos is all about,” Unkrich says. The story, however, simply couldn’t support that structure. “It was a story created from an outsider’s perspective-which I am-and I thought that by having a character who was learning about the culture, it would be a way to teach people around the world about the celebration.” The boy ended up going down to Mexico for Día de Muertos it explored a lot of ideas about being Latino but still being a fish out of water in a lot of ways,” he says. “The first story that we worked on for about a year was about an American kid who had a Mexican mother and an American father. Unkrich, who doesn’t come from a Mexican background, discovered in preproduction just how tricky the storytelling would be. “The earliest stories we came up with were completely different than what we have now,” admits co-director Lee Unkrich, who has helmed other Pixar hits like Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and Toy Story 2 and 3. In production since 2011, Coco hits theaters this November, having gone through a number of iterations before the studio and filmmakers felt they had a film they were sure would connect with audiences. The team behind Disney Pixar’s Coco can attest to those challenges. Aesthetics aside, however, creating such a film would by no means be an easy task-making a specific cultural tradition accessible to a global audience, while skirting concerns over cultural appropriation and authenticity, would be a daunting challenge for any production. Its unique, colorful visual aesthetic, beguiling folkloric mythology, and family-centric ideals make it ripe for an ambitious big-screen interpretation. It’s easy to understand why Día de Muertos, the Mexican holiday known to English-speakers as Day of the Dead, would prove such an alluring inspiration for animators.
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