SpectralTime
Since: Apr, 2009
07/27/2022 00:00:00
Re-watching it for the first time in a while, I was giving too little credit to the fact that Miguel’s loving friendship with his elderly great grandmother does much to humanize him, but was not critical enough of how much of the first third of the film is devoted to exposition, some of it reasonable and some of it clumsy, intended to introduce a white/world audience to concepts they might be unfamiliar with.
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A Very Shaky Start, But Builds Up a Whole Lot of Steam
So, full disclosure. I'm not hispanic, I've never celebrated Dia de los Muertos even in the high school Spanish class that familiarized me with the holiday, and I'm not a musician in any capacity. But I do love folk music, friendly skeletons, and psychedelic colors, and this movie has lots of those.
This isn't a perfect movie, and a lot of the reasons why involve the first act. After a pretty intro using paper cut-outs to tell the story of how a shoemaking family came to hate music, we get shoved into a very familiar story of a kid who wants to follow his artistic dreams, but whose family are stubbornly opposed to his fantasies of chasing stardom through music. There's a few good comedy beats in there to make it go down more smoothly, but I don't think the movie really starts to fire on all cylinders until his attempt at stealing from the dead on a bad night to do so lands him in Xibalba.
From there, the story really starts to pick up, and even goes in a couple unexpected directions. My only major complaints about this section of the film are the conspicuous absence of the Catholic elements so central to the modern holiday, and the fact that a number of the dead family members, despite having designs that absolutely drip with personality, don't really get enough screentime.
I recognize that morals about family being important and following one's dreams are dime-a-dozen in kids' and family pictures, but, without wanting to spoil, I think this film did manage to handle both in an atypically-mature, interesting way that I haven't really seen enough. And the colorful, skeleton-filled land of the dead is gorgeous and lively without ever fully succumbing to How To Tame Your Dragon-itis.
The central protagonist kind of annoyed me at the start, but I grew to like him as the story went on, and the rest of the cast was wonderful. Special mention goes to the fast-talking huckster character you think you've seen in a million other animated pictures, who turns out to be a lot more sympathetic and interesting than he seems at first blush.
It's not one of the top-tier of Pixar films, but it's definitely one of the best in the middle-tier. If you have the patience to wait through the first leg of the story, the rest of the film is worth it.