{"id":6427,"date":"2018-03-03T20:36:56","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T01:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6427"},"modified":"2018-03-03T20:36:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-04T01:36:56","slug":"coco-and-this-years-animated-shorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/03\/coco-and-this-years-animated-shorts\/","title":{"rendered":"Coco and this year\u2019s animated shorts."},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2017 slate of big studio animated movies was rather dismal, which I think is going to lead to an easy win for Coco<\/em>, the best of the batch by any measure, especially since some of the best indie animated films didn\u2019t even score nominations. Coco<\/em> (available to rent\/buy on amazon<\/a> or iTunes<\/a>) is genuinely very good, if not really at Peak Pixar levels; it\u2019s better than the sequels Pixar has churned out recently, like Finding Dory<\/em> and Monsters U.<\/em>, just not at the standard set by films like Up<\/em> or WALL-E<\/em> or the Toy Story<\/em> trilogy.<\/p>\n

(I suppose this disclaimer is barely necessary at this point, but just in case: I work for ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which owns Pixar, which made Coco<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The protagonist of Coco<\/em> is not actually Coco, but Miguel, a young Mexican boy who wants nothing more in life than to be a musician, but whose great-great-grandfather left his wife and very young daughter, Coco, to pursue his dreams in music. That has made the family extremely bitter towards music, to the point where Miguel has to hide his records and his homemade guitar from his parents and relatives, especially his grandmother, who is basically Nurse Ratchet in abuelita<\/em> form.<\/p>\n

Of course, he gets caught, runs away, and ends up crossing over the bridge to the netherworld where the mostly-dead spirits of the recently deceased reside in relative luxury … as long as someone alive still remembers them. On the Day of the Dead, the spirits can come back to visit their relatives as long as someone has put up their pictures on their ofrendas<\/em>. Miguel can get back to the land of the living, but wants to do it in a way that doesn\u2019t require him to surrender his dreams of becoming a musician, which leads him to chase down the man he thinks is his deceased great-great-grandfather, the underworld-famous musician Ernesto de la Cruz. (Spoiler alert: It\u2019s not him, and God help you if you didn\u2019t see that one coming.) So Miguel has to learn some important lessons about family, sing a song or two, and eventually get back to the living while also restoring a lost link to his family\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

Coco<\/em> looks great, as all Pixar movies do, although I think since Brave<\/em> they\u2019ve kind of run up against a barrier of animation quality – Pixar films have blown me away visually so many times in the past that there isn\u2019t much left for them to impress me with. This film is colorful and bright and very appealing, especially the spirit animals of the netherworld, but it\u2019s also what we\u2019ve come to expect from this studio. The story itself is just so-so, although there are plenty of sight gags and a bunch of references that will sail over younger readers\u2019 heads but entertain the parents. (Bonus points for getting my daughter to ask me who Frida Kahlo was.) The setup never really worked for me – the loving parents who are so hellbent on denying Miguel any kind of music, not just saying he can\u2019t pursue it as a career, but proscribing it as even a hobby. His grandmother destroys his handmade guitar, which just does not gibe at all with the rest of her character; no matter how mad you get, you don\u2019t obliterate something your child made. <\/p>\n

The best Pixar movies all have intricate plots that drop threads early in the film only to tie them all back together near the end. There are no throwaways in movies like The Incredibles<\/em> or Toy Story<\/em> – every detail ends up mattering in a big way. Not only is it satisfying in the moment to see a script recall something from an hour earlier, but it adds to the feeling that these are deep, three-dimensional films to be considered on par with live-action movies. If anything, most live action films would be lucky to bring scripts of the density and sophistication of great Pixar films. Coco<\/em> isn\u2019t one of these; there\u2019s a single plot strand, established early and handled linearly, without much more. Even the complex structure of the netherworld where the skeleton-souls reside felt too familiar, with shots of the great hall and the stadium both recalling similar settings from Harry Potter films.<\/p>\n

In a better year, with a better slate of nominees, I don\u2019t think Coco<\/em> would be deserving of the Best Animated Feature Oscar it\u2019s going to win. It\u2019s the best of the five nominees, and it\u2019s hard for any other studio to match the sheer quality of the CG animation that comes from Pixar. If you go against them on animation, it has to be to choose something novel like the hand-painted cels of Loving Vincent<\/a><\/em> or the visual style of The Breadwinner<\/a><\/em>. (Let\u2019s not even talk about The Boss Baby<\/em>.) Tim Grierson and Will Leitch put this at #14 on their ranking of all 19 Pixar feature films<\/a>, which amounts to dropping it behind all the good ones and ahead of all the mediocre-or-less ones. I can\u2019t disagree.<\/p>\n

* I\u2019ve seen all five Best Animated Short Film nominees just in the last 72 hours, as they were all available somewhere for free: \u201cGarden Party,\u201d \u201cLou<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cNegative Space\u201d were all on YouTube, although at the moment two are gone; \u201cDear Basketball<\/a>\u201d is on Go90; and \u201cRevolting Rhymes\u201d is on Netflix. Of those, \u201dRevolting Rhymes\u201d would be my pick, as it\u2019s inventive, looks fantastic, and manages to develop some characters … but it\u2019s also two episodes of about 28 minutes each, which exceeds the category\u2019s length threshold, so I don\u2019t know if voters have to consider just one of the two parts. It\u2019s based on a Roald Dahl book of rhymes where he reworks some classic fairy tales to add some macabre twists and change the endings, all told here by a Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Dominic West). My daughter and I enjoyed it quite a bit, although I think she\u2019d vote for \u201cLou\u201d instead. That Pixar short brings the items in a school playground lost & found to life to teach the class bully a lesson. It\u2019s cute and sweet and probably gets the nod on animation quality.<\/p>\n

\u201cNegative Space\u201d is a stop-motion piece from Germany about a young man who is remembering how his father taught him his rather scientific method of packing a suitcase to maximize use of the space therein. It\u2019s just five minutes, and there\u2019s a twist that I think you\u2019ll probably see coming. \u201cGarden Party\u201d also has a twist, and the animation of various tropical frogs taking over an apparently abandoned mansion is cool … but there isn\u2019t really a story here. <\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s \u201cDear Basketball,\u201d which I\u2019m worried will win because it involves Kobe Bryant, even though it is clearly the worst of the five. Bryant penned a letter essentially thanking basketball for the huge, positive influence it has had on his life, which is fine, but not munch of a story. The animation looks like charcoal drawings, which is appealing, but ultimately there is just no there here. If it\u2019s not pointless, the point isn\u2019t very sharp. And that\u2019s without considering the fact that Bryant was accused of rape and chose to pay his accuser to make the charges go away – not someone the Academy should want on its stage anyway, not this year of all years. If this were a truly great short film, maybe there\u2019d be an argument for honoring it anyway, but it\u2019s just not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 2017 slate of big studio animated movies was rather dismal, which I think is going to lead to an easy win for Coco, the best of the batch by any measure, especially since some of the best indie animated films didn\u2019t even score nominations. Coco (available to rent\/buy on amazon or iTunes) is genuinely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[975,925,37,577,215,678],"class_list":["post-6427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-best-animated-feature-nominees","tag-2017-movies","tag-animation","tag-disney","tag-movies","tag-pixar","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6427"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6430,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6427\/revisions\/6430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}