What Coco gets right about music and memory
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the end of Pixar’s new film Coco.
Pixar’s new animated movie Coco follows a boy named Miguel on an accidental journey through the Land of the Dead. He befriends a dead man named Hector who desperately wants his living daughter Coco to remember him. But Coco is very old, and her memory is fading. She spends her scenes sitting still, lost in thought, unable to identify members of her own family.
When Miguel returns to the land of the living, he plays Coco a song her father wrote for her and sang to her often when she was a child. The music revives Coco, and she happily sings along with Miguel. She regains her ability to...