Coco
Short description
Coco centers on Miguel, a boy in a Mexican shoemaking family where music has been forbidden for generations. He dreams of playing like the celebrated singer Ernesto de la Cruz, and when he tries to prove his talent, he is carried into the Land of the Dead. There he meets Héctor, a scheming but likable skeleton, and the two travel together to uncover the truth about Miguel's ancestors and the long-standing rift over music in his family. The film, released in 2017 and running 105 minutes, was directed by Lee Unkrich, whose previous feature was Toy Story 3 and who later returned to this story with Coco 2. Matthew Aldrich and Adrian Molina wrote the screenplay, Darla K. Anderson produced it for Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures, and Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renée Victor and Jaime Camil lead the voice cast.
The production had a budget of 175 million US dollars and took in 815 million worldwide, a strong return for an original animated film. Audiences rate it highly: on IMDb it holds 8.4/10 from 700,000 votes and on TMDB 8.2/10 from 21,424 votes. Critics' rating is comparable at 8.3/10 from 358 reviews, so the film found broad approval across professional and general viewers alike.
What's left behind the scenes
- The project's working title was Dia de los Muertos, or «Day of the Dead» (this is the name of a holiday dedicated to the memory of the deceased, celebrated on November 1st and 2nd in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador).
- Pixar employees had not worked with skeleton animation before, so they encountered a technological problem during the creation of the film. The Presto program, responsible for rendering, could not cope with clothing on skeletons. The fabric lay incorrectly on the bones, constantly getting tangled in the neck, legs, and arms, getting stuck in the gaps at the joints. The solution was to create a new program from scratch that handled clothing simulation on skeletons much better. But filling the gaps so that fabric wouldn’t get caught there was only part of the problem. The new software also handled volume exceptionally well. Each skeleton has 127 bones, and about 80 of them are visible to the viewer. The program allowed for the mass generation of characters, creating subtle changes that gave the impression of uniqueness.
- For the world of the dead alone, where much of the action takes place, 7 million individual light sources had to be created—from streetlights to tram car bulbs. To ensure they were all displayed correctly on screen, animators took a program created for the firefly scene in "The Good Dinosaur" and reworked the code. As a result, the program grouped light sources based on various criteria, instead of processing each one individually. This significantly reduced rendering time.
- For the world of the dead alone, where much of the action takes place, 7 million light sources had to be created – from streetlights to tram lights.
- Initially, Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) was only supposed to play the guitar. When director Lee Unkrich learned that Gonzalez could sing well, it was decided that the main character would sing.
- The film constantly shows a flower. It's a marigold, which is the main flower of the Day of the Dead.
- While visiting one of the families in Mexico, the director and screenwriter Lee Unkrich noticed that a dog was showing interest in the offerings to deceased relatives on the home altar, and had to be constantly driven away. Unkrich liked this moment so much that he included it in the script.
- According to directors Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina, the most difficult part of working on the film was animating the grandmother's neck. Molina even asked his mother-in-law, who lived in Mexico City, to come to the studio, where they tried to anger her to see how her neck moved. This proved not easy, as his mother-in-law was a good-natured person, but after several hours they finally succeeded.
- The landscapes of the state of Guanajuato, where colorful houses are located on the slopes of mountains, served as the basis for the image of the Land of the Dead.
- During the preparation, the authors and animators made five trips to Mexico to study the local culture.
- Due to the prolonged work on the film, the voice of the actor voicing the main character began to break, and Anthony Gonzalez was taken instead. The original actor voiced an extra in a scene where he points Ernesto to the stage.
- The film features many famous Mexicans – in particular, wrestler El Santo, actor Cantinflas, actors and singers Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, artist Frida Kahlo, political and military figure of the revolution era Emiliano Zapata, and actress Maria Felix.
- Dante's breed is Xoloitzcuintli, or Mexican hairless dog.
- This is the first Pixar project to directly show the death of main characters.
- Work on the film continued from 2011 to 2017 – a record-long time for Pixar.
- Initially, the film was going to be called “Day of the Dead.” In 2015, The Walt Disney Company attempted to register the trademark “Day of the Dead,” but the company was accused of cultural appropriation. A week later, Disney renamed the film “Coco.”
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
