Disney Pixar's Coco is set in Mexico's Día de los Muertos (day of the dead) celebrations — marking its foray with animation into an alien cultural space. The film's title is a clever play of words, Coco being a mythical ghost-monster found in the folklore of many Hispanic countries. It is also the name of the central character Miguel's great-grandmother.
There is one more facet to the film’s cultural distinction, one which also establishes its connect with India — its technical director happens to be Pune boy Arjun Rihan. He is a part of Pixar's layout team. In plain speak, he's the guy behind the camera and staging of the characters in the film.
The animator joined Pixar in 2009, when his student film, Topi caught the studio’s fancy. “I started developing a film about the Partition because that was a huge part of my personal family history,” says Rihan who has previously worked on Pixar films like Brave (2012), The Good Dinosaur (2015) and Finding Dory (2016). “Both sets of my grandparents are refugees. One day some people from Pixar visited the [university] to interview students and I actually showed them the [incomplete] film.” The young animator was mighty amazed that the folks from Pixar were deeply interested in his process of making Topi.
Ask him what sets Coco apart from the other films he's worked on and he's quick to answer: “Right off the bat, one of the things that's most unique about Coco is that it's the first Pixar film set in a different culture,” he says talking about how the film’s directors really wanted to pay homage to Mexico and its rich culture and traditions. That informed a lot of Pixar’s early work during pre-production, “like the style and where the story was and what were the core elements of the film like the festival and the iconography of that festival,” says Rihan. “It’s rooted in this culture.”
Coco comes at a time when the President of the United Sates, Donald Trump is up in arms against Mexico, wanting to build a wall separating the two countries. The animated film reminds the world of the Latin American country’s abounding history, making it great again. But that's not the only thing that gives Coco an edge over Pixar's other features: it’s also Pixar's first ever animated musical. Since it is set in Mexico, the film uses a lot of local music, like for instance mariachi. “ There are a number of songs and the music is really important in terms of moving the story along from one beat to another,” says the animator.
Pixar's repository of technically superior films is also based on themes that tug at the heart strings and those that are widely relatable. “I think what audiences are going to see is a film that works on different levels,” he avers. “At one level, it is specific to just one culture and there's one festival in Mexico, but the themes in Coco are actually very broad. It's about family and the different generations of a family. So it's about how different generations are connected. It sort of celebrates family in a much deeper way.”
