Coco by Disney’s Pixar (2017)

Posted on January 22, 2021June 19, 2021 by Jennifer Brooke

This creative and sophisticated film represents Mexican culture, primarily focusing on the significance of Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead). The film’s use of surrealistic elements is particularly interesting to explore: the dreamlike images of “the land of the dead” and the motif of music throughout the film keep the audience’s attention on the powerful and conflicting emotions of passion, love, grief, joy, and heartache that accompany our enigmatic desires to keep the dead alive, in our memories and in ourselves.

The viewing activities in this lesson focus on:

developing an understanding of surrealism.
identifying artistic choices made in the film that make the work “surreal”.
consider why writers and artists use surrealism to explore specific ideas and emotions related to the human experience.
synthesizing understanding and ideas about the ways in which the film uses the surreal into a written response.