His 2018 Oscar nomination for Coco, which is up for best animated feature, is far from Lee Unkrich's first time at the awards rodeo. Unkrich joined Pixar more than two decades ago, as the company was transitioning from making just shorts and TV commercials to features. He co-edited Toy Story and went on, as Pixar employees do, to work in various capacities on many more films, including directing Toy Story 3. In Coco, Unkrich roots the story of a young musician whose family hates music in the visually sumptuous and intellectually rich soil of Mexico during a Día de Muertos holiday, creating the most emotionally resonant Pixar film since Toy Story 3. The film incorporates the gorgeous colors of Mexican treasures like Oaxacan alabrijes, the hillside houses of Guanajuato, and the strings of papel picado that festoon so many of the nation's walls and streets. The film also animates resonant Mexican concepts like the belief that we all die three deaths: the first when our hearts stop beating, the second when we are buried or cremated, and the third when there's nobody left on Earth who remembers us.
In a phone interview last week, Unkrich talked about how studying the Día de Muertos helped him deal with the death of his father, the challenges of making a film about Mexico when you're “a white guy from Ohio,” and the tension between family ties and individual freedom.
Coco started out for you as an exploration of Día de Muertos. What initially interested you about the Mexican holiday?
I went to school at the University of California. There's obviously a big Latino community in Los Angeles, and I remember starting to see a lot of the iconography and the folk art having to do with the celebration and being fascinated by it. There was something about the juxtaposition of skeletal imagery and death imagery with bright colors and this feeling of celebration that was so different than anything I had grown up with. So I was interested in that, but I had just kind of filed it away. It wasn't until I finished Toy Story 3 and I was thinking about what to do next that it kind of popped into my mind, the notion of doing something having to do with Día de Muertos.
I started to do a lot of research and learn more about the holiday. I quickly moved beyond the kind of misconception that a lot of people have that it's some kind of Mexican Halloween and started to learn about the roots and the history of the celebration. Death is of course an element in it, but it's not about death; it's about life, it's about family; it's about remembering one's ancestors and keeping their memories alive and passing them along to the next generation. It seemed to me that we could make a film that would not only celebrate the beauty of Mexican culture, but could also tell a story that would be universally relatable around the world.
Has making this film changed your own thinking about death?
I don't know that it has, specifically, but I do know that I now do some things that I didn't do before making this film. My family and I now make an ofrenda at home, and I think that that tradition is going to strengthen over time. It's important to us now. My father just passed away in December.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Luckily, I got to show him Coco just a week before he passed away, and it was really meaningful sharing that experience with him and then knowing that he was going to be joining our offrenda. It's such a lovely notion, to be able to help actively keep people's memories alive and tell their stories. My mom has boxes of old photos and old photo albums from her childhood and the generations before her, and we know who some of the people are in the albums, but we don't know who all of them are, and we certainly don't know who they are as people. I know a few names and maybe one story, but that's kind of it, and that seems like such a shame. That's why this idea of the final death that we explore in Coco seems so powerful to me, this idea that when nobody remembers you any more, you really cease to exist, as if you had never existed in the world before. Read the rest in Slant Magazine
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