Posted in: Disney, Movies | Tagged: coco, disney, film, HRL, pixar

How Pixar's 'Coco' Drew Inspiration From 'Monsters, Inc.'

Published Fri, 18 Aug 2017 15:07:52 -0500

We have a new Pixar movie coming out this fall and its director, Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3), recently spoke to Entertainment Weekly about visual inspiration for the Land of the Dead featured in Coco:

"A lot of folk art and images that people are used to seeing associated with the celebration of Día de los Muertos are directly influenced by Posada. We leaned into that Victorian aesthetic that he embraced, creating his art at the turn of the century, and that ended up influencing a lot of the design, costuming, style, and architecture in our world."

When it came to building the world, Unkrich looked back at previous Pixar movies, including the city of Monstropolis for Monsters, Inc.:

"You have to think about how this all works. We like to find a logic to everything we do and not just make up things to make up things. I find, personally, that the more fantastical people get with world-building and the less relatable it is, you remain kind of emotionally distanced from it. Actually, I would liken the Land of the Dead a bit to what we did in Monsters, Inc., where we created Monstropolis, this familiar but fantastical world of monsters, where there was a lot that's unique and delightful about it, but it's also rooted in a world that we know. We did the same thing here in our vision of the afterworld."

When it came to jobs and what people were doing in the afterworld, Unkrich decided that the job you have in life is similar to the job we have in death:

"We had this notion that whatever your job was in life, that's still your job in the afterlife, for better or worse. There are people that still have to do the same kind of boring, bureaucratic jobs that they did in life."

When it comes to those jobs, though, don't expect any cheap jokes regarding modern pop culture:

"In terms of Starbucks and that kind of thing, I made a decision early on that I didn't want to lean into pop culture references on this film. It's an easy gag to do stuff like that, and we try to make films that are timeless. I want people to be watching these films 75 years from now, and who knows what will be out in the world then? We tried to not go for that easy pop culture reference laugh."

There better be some bone puns or I'm going to flip a table.

Summary: Coco follows a 12-year-old boy named Miguel who sets off a chain of events relating to a century-old mystery, leading to an extraordinary family reunion.

Coco, directed by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, will be released on November 22nd.

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