The animation for depressed adults has some important life lessons to share, but thankfully reiterates that the suffering will one day end.
Coco is a semi-educational Happy Meal animation, primarily aimed at anyone over the age of thirty-four. Using Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration as a canvas to illustrate the importance of family, it, like every Pixar film, is packed with essential life lessons for parents to decipher and then relay to their barely sentient children.
One such lesson is to be supportive of your relatives’ life choices. In Coco, for instance, the diminutive Mexican boy on the film’s poster just wants to strum his guitar, but his family, a mostly decrepit assortment of leathery meats, have forbidden music in their household, for fear that he will turn into someone awful like Ed Sheeran. And as awful as Ed Sheeran is, Coco’s message is that we should not deny our family members who they really are, even if they decide they want to play rugby.
Another piece of advice the film imparts on its midlife crisis audience is that you should probably buy a pet. You see, in Coco, most dogs and cats are actually neon-coloured spirit animals that watch over you, like a phantom Elton John dressed in Ann Summers bestiality gear. So it’s within everyone’s best interest to at least buy a chinchilla, which, in the spirit world, will presumably fend off bad luck by belching fire at it.
Then there’s the most important lesson of them all: make sure you have lots of photos of your deceased relatives. Without them, they’ll fade away from the afterlife in what’s known as a ‘final death’, and then there’s no way they can haunt you, serving as a constant reminder that when you die you have to go through this bollocks all over again – but as a skeleton.
Actually, having thought about it, it’s probably best if you destroy all pictures of yourself before you die so that you don’t have to spend any time in the afterlife. Skip that stage altogether and go straight to the blissful, Ed Sheeran-less abyss of nonexistence. I may not be in keeping with the spirit of the film here, but the plot wasn’t that good anyway.