Coco

Pixar's Coco follows a young Mexican boy named Miguel, whom we meet on Día de los Muertos, a Mexican holiday that honors the dead; on this day, family members leave offerings and pictures of deceased relatives on an ofrenda. In this animated take on the holiday, deceased family members inhabit the Land of the Dead, a thriving society of skeletons who hold jobs, have loving relationships, and make music and art. On Día de los Muertos, the separation between the living and the dead dissolves, and the dead are able to visit their living family members on the condition that their photograph sits on an ofrenda. Another rule governs this holiday: relatives remain in the Land of the Dead so long as someone alive remembers them. Once they are forgotten, they disappear forever and are no longer able to visit their relatives.

Without my revealing specific spoilers, one can imagine that the mentioned two stipulations, that there be a photograph present for this once-a-year moment and that living relatives remember their deceased loved ones else they disappear forever, provide ample opportunity for a high stakes and entertaining plot. And while the scenery is spectacular, the glowing colors enchanting, the animation intricate and delightful, and the honoring of Mexican culture inspiring in our current political climate, it is the focus of the movie that most blows me away.

This is a movie, a children's movie, steeped in death. The very first scene takes place in a graveyard, Miguel's shoulder hits a toy skeleton as he runs happily to the plaza in an early scene, and most of the movie takes place in the Land of the Dead where every character except Miguel is a skeleton. Mama Coco, Miguel's very old grandmother whom we meet in the opening scenes of the movie, is shown as likely having dementia; in an early scene she seeks out her (dead) father but does not recognize her own daughter.

But somehow the movie is neither sad nor morbid. The emotional tugs of the movie, the tear-jerking moments, revolve not around death but around memory. By depicting dead relatives in the urban exciting lively Land of the Dead, the movie dethrones death as the ultimate separation. Instead, it is the lack of being remembered by family that the dead fear above all else. In a climactic moment between two estranged family members, Miguel reminds his female ancestor of the ultimate goal: “you don't have to forgive him, but we shouldn't forget him.”

I must spoil the final scenes to mention one other amazing feat this movie pulls off. Nearing the terminal stages of dementia—forgetting even her long-term memories of her father—Coco is brought back to her memories of being a little girl through the power of music. Coco's face lights up, and she finds a happiness she has not shown throughout the rest of the movie. Despite the action-packed sequences having concluded, this is the movie's true climax, and I have cried at this scene every time I have seen it. In the next scene, we are taken to the following year and learn that Coco has passed away. Yet (and again, here is the magic of this movie), the moment is not overwhelmingly sad. There is a pause and a smile from Miguel and his grandmother as they place Coco's photograph on the ofrenda, but in a subsequent scene you see Coco walking in the Land of the Dead with her father, holding his hand like a child, being swept up into a hug with gray hair bouncing on her bare skull. What they manage to accomplish with Coco, the movie's namesake, is somehow depict an elderly woman near her final days and simultaneously the girl she once was, or, with this movie's otherworldly magic, the girl she still is. And the death of this family member, this great grandmother and young daughter, passes without an overwhelming sense of loss, because we are assured that her memory lives on in her descendants. As the movie's Oscar-winning original song “Remember Me” goes, “Remember me/Though I have to say goodbye/Remember me/Don't let it make you cry.”

I wish I could better see my elderly and dying patients this way, as the children and teenagers and young adults they once were and still are. I wish that more often, the focus of our conversations with patients at the end of life revolved around how their family was going to best remember them, and not how to stop or prevent their inevitable death. I wish we spent more time teaching residents about the connectivity between memory and family, ritual and grief. I wish we could play music for the skeletons we see in X-rays and PET scans. I wish we did not see death as an ultimate ending, but instead as a passage to some nearby world whose boundary with ours occasionally dissolves. I wish conversations about death were filled with as much color, magic, and joy as Pixar's masterpiece Coco.

Until then, I will simply recommend that everyone go see it for themselves.