I’m not going to trash-talk Disney’s upcoming Dia De Los Muertos film “Coco”, because due to track records, it is probably going to be a good movie, it’s probably coming from a place of the best intentions, and when it comes to cultural exposure, having more of a thing is better than having less. But when considering this film and its almost guaranteed future success, and while being aware of last year’s “The Book of Life”, which received favorable reviews but mostly floated in the box offices and only made back twice its budget after global totals, you have to take into consideration some un-ignorable facts about certain attitudes involved in making movies with particular cultural demographics.
Jorge Gutierrez had wanted to do a movie about Dia De Los Muertos ever since he got into animation. While he had been heavily referencing various aspects of Mexican culture for as long as he had been creating art, this film was his dream project, he wanted to give the world a glimpse of the heritage of his homeland through the lens of one of its most unique and visually unmistakable holidays. But it took him 15 YEARS of continued pitching and shopping his concept around to various animation companies and producers, and the turn-away that he got most frequently during this push period was that no one thought a movie exclusively about Mexican characters and cultural themes would be accessible to a mass market audience.
Luckily, he eventually managed to hook up with fellow Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and they were finally able to make the movie, a sweet little tale about family, tradition, and personal integrity, with a visual aesthetic unlike any other animated film out there, and a voice cast chock full of actors of Mexican and Latino heritage. It should have been the dream film of the increasingly mindful audiences of internet enclaves like tumblr, who have been clamoring for more multicultural mass-market entertainment with greater and greater fervor. Yet, when it was released, it was subject to bizarre critiques of racism and/or inadquacy from some of the tumblr-sphere. Perhaps an audience raised on a diet of sheer tokenism simply wasn’t able to understand that when a cast has adequate multicultural representation, it allows those characters to occupy more nuanced roles than just the “after-school special presentation” nobility that pervades multicultural media in the era of racial guilt, which means they can include villains and comedy relief. Perhaps they didn’t understand that if a creator grows up in a cultural identity, they can address and poke fun at its foibles and eccentricities from a place of understanding through experience. Perhaps they didn’t understand that modern Mexican pop culture does not exist in a bubble, which would lead to the inclusion of American rock radio hits in the soundtrack. Or perhaps the film just had the misfortune of being the first of its kind, and therefore bearing the burden of needing to be absolutely perfect in too many ways to be considered a “worthwhile” example of multicultural cinema. Whatever the case, it most certainly didn’t get as much word of mouth as it deserved, and it was already coping with the low levels of advertisement and press that so frequently plague “risky films” of its ilk that often doom them to a self-fulfilling prophecy of less than stellar box office performance. It wasn’t the greatest film ever made, but it certainly deserved a little more than just breaking even in the US. And it certainly deserves more than to be just forgotten when the richest, most successful animation studio in American history suddenly decides that it’s going to do its own take on the holiday.
No one owns the rights to a holiday (even though Disney DID attempt to trademark the phrase “Dia de Los Muertos” in preparation for complete brand control in future marketing, an act which was earned them no love from Mexican cultural commentators), and ultimately everyone’s free to make media with distinct cultural themes. But it’s often the case in America that people are only made to care about certain cultural experiences when they are somehow “discovered” by those who arbitrate the culture, those who are predominantly wealthy and white. No one seems to care when a cultural minority wants to tell their own stories as they live and experience and treasure them, unless they are guaranteed to be worth the investment of those wealthy white folks who control the majority of the means of production and distribution. Take these things into consideration when the eventual hype blitz surrounding “Coco” starts to take off, and when that hype starts capitalizing on the “innovation” of depicting a particular cultural experience, even though that experience was already there to be told by the people who live it. It’s just that not many people cared until the most famous name in entertainment got their hands on it.
