CocoRemember Me, or I Fade Away

Animation films have a way of slipping deep philosophical questions into a simple story built on fantasy. Then, when the lights come up, it turns out the fantasy was asking something of us, the viewers.

WALL-E did exactly this. It had a simple plot, funny gags and an exciting climax, and under all that it asked a serious question: what is the nature of feelings?

We think of love, loss and grief as part of being human. We generously extend these emotions to animals, mostly our pets, and assume they love us back. Science is still working out how much animals really feel. Is a mother’s protectiveness towards her infant deep love, or a chemical instinct put there by evolution?

WALL-E takes that question several levels further. Its hero is a robot, and his journey is full of love, attachment and grief. So the film leaves us asking: if feelings belong to the living, can they go beyond the living? Can a robot, which by our definition is “non-living”, feel anything at all? It’s an important question now that artificial intelligence is on the rise. Blade Runner asked the same thing in a dark, dystopian way. WALL-E asked it lightly.

When I finished watching Coco, I was left with a similar question: what defines our existence? Is it just our physical body, or is the idea of us something more? When do we really die: when our time on this planet ends, or later?

On the surface, this is a question about the afterlife, and the plot of the film does revolve around the afterlife. But the key moment comes when a character in the Land of the Dead fades away and disappears, and Héctor explains that we truly die when there is no one left in the living world to remember us. When we no longer live even in someone else’s memory, we stop existing, both as a body and as an idea. The film calls this “the final death”.

Hindu tradition is full of ways to remember the dead, much like the Mexican Día de los Muertos shown in the film. We remember a person on their death anniversary with the varsha shraddha (वर्षश्राद्ध). Beyond that, pitru pandharvada (पितृपंधरवडा) is a whole fortnight for paying respects to all our ancestors. In a way, they still live in our memories.

The film goes one step further: eventually, everyone fades away, even in the afterlife. Four or five generations later, a time will surely come when, despite every tradition, every family tree, book and historical record, we won’t remain even as a memory.

Heavy stuff for a “cartoon” film. You’d expect to walk out of the theatre in a sombre mood, but you don’t. That’s the magic of Coco.

The film never lets the weight of its question sit on your chest. It carries death lightly, wrapped in animation you can’t take your eyes off. It has bright colours, music, songs, dance, emotion and laugh-out-loud scenes, so much that it could easily pass for a Bollywood masala film.

The makers are hugely imaginative, and they use an afterlife full of skeletons to create one amazing moment after another. Some lines are outright funny: “You don’t name a street dog, or you end up feeding him every day.” The characters are well rounded, and Dante the dog is adorable. Altogether, it’s a treat to watch.

An animated film usually gets labelled a “cartoon” film, so it draws a lot of kids under seven (or, more accurately, their parents pick a “cartoon” for them). But Coco has a lot of conversation and detail for a young mind to follow. The action comes and goes, and there are stretches of lull where nothing “interesting” happens on screen. So the film soon falls outside the small orbit of a child’s attention span.

That’s when you feel a knock on the back of your seat. A random kid runs up and down the stairs. A brother and sister roll around on the carpet in front of the screen. It’s a mix of adorable and distracting, and there’s nothing you can do about it. After all, whom are you going to complain to?