‘Coco’: Plot Details & Casting For Pixar Film Revealed

Pixar announced their next original film Coco back in 2012, yet since little has been revealed about the film. We knew the film would take place in Mexico during Dia de los Muertos, aka Day of the Dead, and the Toy Story 3 directors and producers were attached. Finally however, more information has been revealed.

First off the film will be very music-heavy, but won’t exactly be a musical. Second, Benjamin Bratt, Renee Victor, and Gael Garcia Bernal have been cast alongside newcomer Anthony Gonzalez, who will play the main character Miguel, a 12-year-old Mexican boy. Victor will play Miguel’s grandmother, Abuelita.

A fairly lengthy synopsis has also been released:

Coco follows the secret musical ambitions of Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village but comes from a family of shoemakers that may be the town’s only music-hating household. For generations, the Riveras have banned music because they believe they’ve been cursed by it; as their family history goes, Miguel’s great-great-grandfather abandoned his wife decades earlier to follow his own dreams of performing, leaving Imelda (Miguel’s great-great-grandmother) to take control as the matriarch of the now-thriving Rivera line and declare music dead to the family forever.

But Miguel harbors a secret desire to seize his musical moment, inspired by his favorite singer of all time, the late Ernesto de la Cruz (Bratt). It’s only after Miguel discovers an amazing link between himself and De la Cruz that he takes action to emulate the famous singer and, in doing so, accidentally enters the Land of the Dead.

In the beautiful underworld, it’s not long until Miguel encounters the souls of his own family — generations’ worth of long-dead but no less vivacious Rivera ancestors, including great-grandmother Imelda. Still, given the opportunity to roam around the Land of the Dead, Miguel decides to track down De la Cruz himself. He teams up with another friendly (and skeletal) spirit — a trickster named Hector, voiced by Bernal — to find De la Cruz, earn his family’s blessing to perform, and return to the Land of the Living before time runs out.

The film’s director, Lee Unkrich spoke about why these casting choices were important.

“It was important to us from day one that we had an all-Latino cast. It focused us, and we ended up with a fantastic mix of people — some from Mexico and some from Los Angeles.”

Coco is scheduled to release November 22nd, 2017.

Source: EW