“For me, it was a long time coming to be able to tell a story that was so close to my feelings about family,” he says. Molina turned in unsolicited pages to Unkrich, certain that, at some point, “everyone was going to say, ‘that was sweet. He devoted hours to Coco in the evenings and on weekends, extra time nobody asked him to spend. But the 32-year-old saw his own Mexican heritage in the story-one he couldn’t put down when he went home. Having worked with Unkrich as a story artist on Toy Story 3, Molina was brought on initially in that same capacity. Courtesy of Vivien Killilea/Getty Imagesįor Molina, the chance to be both screenwriter and co-director on Coco is one he pursued as passionately as Miguel chases music. Both the lonely robot Wall-E and the curious rat Remy saw their dreams reflected back to them from a flickering screen.ĭirector Adrian Molina at Vulture Festival LA. When Molina first saw what would become Miguel’s costume-a pair of jeans, a white tank, and a red hoodie-he observed: “That’s a little Elliott from E.T.” Molina’s co-director, Lee Unkrich, went with a slightly older reference: “ Steve Austin from the Six-Million Dollar Man.”īut you don’t even have to look outside the Pixar canon to find characters staring hopefully at a gleaming television. Molina says Spielberg’s signature shot didn’t directly inspire Miguel’s moment here, but that his influence did creep in elsewhere.
That becomes the feeling that you’re trying to chase for the rest of the movie.”
Miguel and the music are one and the same, and if we’re successful in conveying that, then we don’t need to say, one more time during the movie, how much he wants to play. This direct approach didn’t go over well when tested what 12-year-old is self-possessed enough to go around saying things like, “music is in my bones, I have to play music, it’s part of who I am”? So Molina went, literally, back to the drawing board, eventually coming up with the moment in which Miguel, tucked away in a secret hideout and surrounded by de la Cruz mementos, watches old videos of his idol while practicing on a makeshift guitar.Īs Miguel is transported, Molina explains, the song track and Ernesto de la Cruz’s dialogue “gain this echo-y, watery sense to convey this feeling that Miguel is lost in this music. “If you don’t buy that music is the air he breathes, you’re in the middle of the theater asking yourself: ‘Why was he doing this?’” In the earliest versions of the film, Miguel expresses his love for music by simply talking about it. “He yells at his family, he runs away, he breaks into this room, he crosses over into the land of the dead, and he chooses to pursue the most elusive person possible, all in order to have a chance at fulfilling those dreams to be a musician,” Molina explains. What follows is a journey into the afterlife that sees Miguel risking almost everything to follow this one simple dream. On the eve of Día de Muertos, Miguel breaks into de la Cruz’s mausoleum in order to borrow the famous skull guitar that hangs there so that he can enter a talent competition and convince his family to embrace music again. That musician, Miguel discovers at the start of the film, is actually his town’s most famous son: deceased film star and music supernova Ernesto de la Cruz ( Benjamin Bratt). But there’s one deceptively simple early scene that proved especially challenging for Coco’s creative team and co-director Adrian Molina-a Pixar storyboard artist stepping into the director’s chair for the first time.Ĭoco is the story of Miguel ( Anthony Gonzalez), a sweet kid who loves music despite the fact that his abuelita ( Renée Victor) has strictly forbidden it, thanks to a long-ago drama involving Miguel’s great-great-grandfather, a dashing musician who walked out on the family. From the arresting, luminous city of the dead to the nonstop music and those eye-popping, mystical alebrijes, Coco is packed to the gills with visual and auditory delights.
There’s a number of dazzling elements in Pixar’s latest film Coco that will have filmgoers young and old talking-once they’ve stopped sniffling those trademark Pixar tears, that is.
0 kommentar(er)
