The Long Journey to Make Pixar's Dia de los Muertos Movie Coco

Right after Toy Story 3 was released, director Lee Unkrich approached Disney about making a movie centered around Dia de los Muertos. They greenlit the project, although there was no story, no characters, and no plan. The years since then have seen the movie that became Coco develop and change, and change again.

The movie’s original story was vastly different than what happens in the final film. “[Originally,] we told a story about an American boy who had a Mexican mother and an American father. And his Mexican mother had passed away,” Unkrich explained. “It was a story about his father taking him down to Mexico to meet the Mexican side of his family, and he ended up being exposed to Dia de los Muertos and going on this fantastical adventure.”

This remained the story until the director suddenly realized something was very, very wrong. “It was ultimately a story about a kid dealing with his grief and learning to say goodbye to the memory of his mother,” Unkrich said. “And I realized we were telling a story that was thematically completely antithetical to what Dia de los Muertos is about. Die de los Muertos is about never letting go.”

Additionally, the original idea also presented the Mexican holiday through an American perspective, so it was scrapped. “We all held hands and said, ‘You know, we’re making a mistake here, this isn’t quite right,’ and we started fresh again,” Unkrich said.

After years of development, the movie evolved to focus on Miguel, a young Mexican boy who runs off to the Land of the Dead to solve the mystery of why his family hates music. And while the story was working and things were progressing, there were still challenges.

Read about more changes to the movie Coco over its six-year development at io9. Coco opens November 22 nationwide.


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The Pill may not have fulfilled all its hopes, but it sure made a difference in the size of families. In my experience, it seems that everyone older than me has seven to ten siblings, and everyone younger comes from a family of two or three children (with some exceptions of course). If a person my age is the youngest of the family, he or she often has many older siblings. If a person my age is the oldest, he or she usually only has one or two younger siblings. The Pill gave women the power to decide how many children they birthed.
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"The proper course of courtship was to go steady, become lavaliered, pinned, then engaged."

I didn't know that they gave PhDs in 50s television. Did she do her dissertation on The Donna Reed Show?
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I know for a fact that The Pill is the main reason my mom felt that she could attain a doctorate in economics and not be tied down as soon as she was out of high school. I was born a few years after she got her Masters degree, after she met my dad (her student, actually :P). She was 29 years old by then.
Her PhD was finished by the time I was 7 years old, but if the pill hadn't held off my birth and then my brother's birth, she said that it never would have happened.
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The pill has uses for things other than preventing pregnancy. Like preventing horrible giant cysts, managing heavy bleeding and cramps and lots of other things. Preventing pregnancy is just its original and main use.
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Uh, some of those ''smaller'' families are probably due to something called abortion as well as the pill.

The pill is a good way to control when you get pregnant. Can't say it's been great for girls and women as a lifestyle choice, though.

Pretty much means, now, that girls start having sex at an incredibly young age and have sex with an outrageous number of men by the time they decide to settle down.

Can't see how having more lovers than you can count on one hand (or two) is a good thing.

In any day and age.
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Lulu I think lots of boys pityfully will testify that lots of girls still not have had "outrageous number(s) of men by the time they decide to settle down" like you put it.

I think the pill will have had (a lot of) influence, but also a lot in other areas than strictly the pregnancy control- Lots of females I know use the pill as a way to control, manage and time their period and the moodswings and bellyhurts that accompany that. They still not go all-out in sexual activity, but they use it to just have easier lives as it comes to being able to participate in activities that otherwise would be hindered by their monthly inconveniences. So in that respect I do see that the pill can be great as a lifestyle choice.
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lulu: Kids aren't having sex younger:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27well.html

Also, what's wrong with having lots of sexual partners? You're not instantly given a sexually transmitted infection or an unwanted pregnancy after you've had a certain number of partners. As long as people practice safe sex, it doesn't matter how many partners someone has had.
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