First Take: Coco- seize the moment

SYNOPSIS-

Aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his family’s ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather, a legendary singer.

Pixar are putting out 2 big films this year, one of them is arguably the sequel a lot of people have been eagerly anticipating for nearly 14 years, the other is the Day of the Dead inspired musical that’s been in development since 2010. While this may not be Pixar’s best, it’s still enjoyable but it does suffer from a few problems.

Lee Unkrich directs the film well, taking his original idea to the screen pretty decently, however, the pacing is not ideal, and some elements of the narrative feel predictable and a little out of left field, most notably during the final act of the film where it all seems to fall apart. Even Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich’s script suffers from issues, as only a select few of the jokes actually got a reaction, however, the animation is fantastic as you’d expect from the studio that gave us Up, Toy Story and Monsters Inc, with Michael Giacchino providing a score that adds to the very prominent Mexican influences that inspired the film’s basis alongside a new track penned by Robert and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (the couple who wrote the songs for a fellow Disney film about seasonal holidays).

The voice cast are brilliant though, with Anthony Gonzalez making a hell of a start in the film industry as the film’s lead, and working alongside Benjamin Bratt and the legendary Gael Garcia Bernal amongst others, the cast are able to bring this film to life, but the combination of pacing trouble and a plot that I couldn’t truly engage with made it a challenge to sit through, and at 1 hour 45 minutes, this may not be the best animation to start the year, but it will do ridiculously well regardless.

THE VERDICT

It may not be perfect, but Coco does what it says on the tin by entertaining families for a few hours. It will have a great run here in the UK when it officially opens on Friday, but I don’t think that this will be the Pixar production that we’ll be talking about by the year’s end.

RATING- 3.5/5