More The Merrier: Second Teaser/Short for 'Coco' Arrives

Well how about that? Another look at Pixar's upcoming original story Coco has been released!

A sort-of teaser/short film, it's a fun watch. There's lots of classic cartoony slapstick here, though I wonder if the movie itself will have that kind of humor. Maybe, maybe not.


Now this was actually shown in other countries. Someone leaked it onto YouTube (it was a recording in a movie theater, and it was in Spanish) a couple weeks back when the American teaser was released, so it's cool to see that Disney's marketing and Pixar have released it here.

Just a month in, and this campaign is pretty strong so far. Definitely a real 180 from how they marketed The Good Dinosaur, which like Coco, was a fall release in 2015 that came off the heels of a summer Pixar event - Inside Out. Coco is the fall Pixar movie this year, Cars 3 is the summer release. Looks like the same mistakes won't be made again.

Now, will they attach this to something in theaters? The next family-friendly Disney release is the Disneynature film Born in China, it could show up before that, but there's already a great teaser out so maybe not. Or maybe they'll combine the two, for Cars 3's first extended look combined the teaser and new footage. (And that "extended look" is rolling in theaters, I catch it frequently at the theater I work at.)

Who knows what they'll do.

UPDATE: I'm hearing it was shown before Beauty and the Beast. I didn't get to catch the preview reels for that at work.

What did you think of the short?

A New World: Teaser for 'Coco' Surfaces

It is finally here! The teaser for Pixar's new original tale, the Day of the Dead story Coco!


What a teaser this was!

Not only does it successfully establish the concept *and* some of the storyline itself, it also has a great atmosphere, a very nice retro vibe (VHS and LPs!), and lots of little subtleties. Pixar's take on the Land of the Dead is a country mile from The Book of Life's depiction of it. While Book of Life's was a painterly, visually amazing city... This is like a forest of town neighborhoods and highways, they almost look like individual trees with buildings wrapped around them. It's big, complicated, and stunning.

The music also sounds great, and also boosts the atmosphere. I think the teaser really shows how songs will be worked into the picture, and how the film won't be a more traditional break-out-into-song musical, as that has been emphasized long before this teaser was put together. I'm quite fine with this direction, though one day it would be cool to see Pixar take their crack at the classic "singing" musical.

The teaser is definitely a nice change of pace from jokes-jokes-jokes.

In fact, Pixar's teasers have been rather different as of late. Pixar actually sort of pioneered the gag-based animated movie teaser.

For their second feature, 1998's A Bug's Life, they made a teaser composed of animation made just for it that wouldn't be used in the film itself. Ever since that film came out, Pixar has done this for almost every subsequent picture of theirs. Now, for a long while, these were also very humorous teasers. WALL-E's teaser broke the mold a bit and Up's was a little cryptic, but it was back to the funny teaser after that. Then the teaser for Brave showed up. Not a joke in sight in that one, it was rather serious and it ended on an intense moment, not a gag.

Now... The current trend we're seeing began with, oddly enough, The Good Dinosaur. That film's teaser showed the film's opening minute with the asteroid missing Earth, and then a montage of clips from the actual movie - not special animation made just for the teaser - set to some pretty epic music, no dialogue at all. Finding Dory's teaser was an alternate version of a scene from the movie, this very version was going to be in the movie before the filmmakers decided that it wasn't up to snuff. (You can see this on the Blu-ray's selection of deleted scenes.)

Cars 3, their next feature, had a teaser that had maybe one line of dialogue... It was just shots of a race, and then Lightning McQueen crashing and flipping over in slow-motion. The race is also in the movie itself, though it was re-lit for the teaser. McQueen's climactic crash is actually going to take place at nighttime.

Now we've got this. This has got to be footage from the movie itself, all of it. If it isn't, I'll be surprised. There's very little humor in here, and it's all about story, Miguel's character, the atmosphere, and the premise itself. This is one of Pixar's best teasers yet...

What say you?

The Party Starts: Teaser Poster for 'Coco' Debuts

With its teaser debuting next week, a proper poster for Pixar's new original tale Coco is here!

It's a pretty interesting teaser poster. I love all the little hints at the story and such: The guitar, the flying petals, and the skeleton petting the xolo - appropriately named Dante. It definitely shows what kind of picture we're in for.

The teaser trailer is confirmed to be around a minute and a half long, and could quite possibly be the compilation of footage D23 attendees saw back in August of 2015.

Pixar and Disney marketing are going about this one differently...

This year marks the second year ever where Pixar released two pictures. 2015 was the first, and the placement was the same. One movie in mid-June, the second during Thanksgiving. In 2015, Inside Out was the June title and The Good Dinosaur debuted during Thanksgiving week. This year's models are Cars 3 and this.

So, 2015... Disney marketing began the campaign for Good Dinosaur in June of that year, did a teaser and a few trailers, some TV spots, some other stuff... It was an unusually sparse and vague campaign for a Pixar film that ended up sinking the overbudgeted film on opening weekend. From the looks of it, I think they'll treat Coco as more of an event, for Good Dinosaur was honestly kind of a hard sell, being a weirdo minimalist Western that starred cartoony-looking prehistoric beasts. The more I think of it, the weirder it is... For a Pixar movie, even! Coco has Day of the Dead, music, timely elements, and a lot of other cool stuff.

To me it just seems like a bigger movie. The teaser coming this early makes me think they're actually prepping this one to be a holiday season smash. I didn't sense that confidence with The Good Dinosaur's marketing.

But what's also weird is that many of the recent Walt Disney Animation Studios hits - all of these particular ones being November releases - didn't have this kind of rollout, either. All of Disney Animation's November releases since 2010 have had their marketing campaigns begin in the Junes of their respective years. Yes, even billion dollar smash Frozen! Again... March, for a November animated release - WDAS or Pixar - I think indicates confidence... And there's a whole other Pixar movie opening before this one, too.

Now I'm not saying this is the next Frozen in terms of the box office, I just think it'll be a hit and Pixar will have greater success this year than they did in 2015.

Anyways, I'm excited for the teaser. What do you think of the poster?

Strumming Pixar: First Image and More Details from 'Coco'

What a lovely Christmas present... A bit of Pixar's next original movie!

That's right, a lovely-looking image and some more plot details on Coco have been released. The film is set to open Thanksgiving week of this coming year.

The new look at the film from Entertainment Weekly sheds more light on the musical side of the picture. This will not be a Renaissance Disney-style musical, where characters break out into song. In director Lee Unkrich's words, the film is "set against the backdrop of musical performance." So, still a musical in some way, but not the kind of musical you may be thinking of. That's good!

When Pixar was making Toy Story back in the early-to-mid 1990s, the attitude was essentially, "Let's not make a modern Disney animated feature." Nothing with musical numbers sung by characters onscreen, nothing with "I Want" songs, the usual with Disney's early 90s juggernaut hits. Pixar didn't want to make the next The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast, and this is partially why Toy Story took off in 1995.

Years went by. Some Pixar films had songs that were sung offscreen (the Toy Story films, the Cars films), some incidental musical numbers (Brave's 'Song of Mor'du') showed up, but other than that Pixar has mostly avoided musical movies like the plague. So to see them doing a movie where singing is integrated in a more realistic way is quite exciting, showing that animated musicals can be more than just what may be accustomed to. They can be more than the dramatic types where characters break out into song.

The article went on to stress how Pixar is being very careful with this film, and how they didn't want to resort to stereotypes when telling a story based in another culture. Upon apologizing for Disney's attempt to trademark the Day of the Dead holiday, Unkrich said, "This is a story we want to share with the world, but it’s also been particularly important to us that when the Latino community sees the film, that it resonates and it feels like we got it right, and that’s what we’re really trying to do. We all feel the gravity."

This comes hot off the heels of the recent controversy that surrounded The Hollywood Reporter's misfired animation roundtable on diversity. Coco certainly got some sneers when it came on the scene, many folk being concerned about the film stereotyping and appropriating Mexican culture. Some even suggested that Pixar, an American studio and director Lee Unkrich - an American without a Hispanic background - have no right to tell stories like these. (Funny, I didn't see them say that about the Portland-based LAIKA and director/founder Travis Knight, when they were readying their Kubo and the Two Strings.) Others spoke out in support of the project, despite the fact that it's mostly being spearheaded by Americans. One of those very supporters is Jorge Guiterrez himself, the writer-director of the other Day of the Dead, music-flavored animated film The Book of Life.

About the Day of the Dead... A new plot detail reveals a little something neat. As we learned last time, the music-loving Miguel comes from a music-averse family. They ban it because the kid's great-great-great grandmother was abandoned by her husband, who jumped ship on the family to pursue a career in music. Ever since, everyone in Miguel's family won't allow it. One night, Miguel does a little well-intentioned grave-robbing of his long-decased musical hero: Ernesto De La Cruz. On the Day of the Dead... And that sends him to the Land of the Dead! His music-averse relatives are sure going to like the sound of that!

This report and the previous one reaffirm that this will be the kind of Pixar film that seems to gel with everyone. This won't be a deceptively simplistic film like The Good Dinosaur, nor will it be a traditional kind of story that Brave was. Films like those proved to be divisive, Coco looks to channel the beloved Inside Out and WALL-E more than those films. As someone who quite liked those "lesser" films, and as one who is tired of animation having to have plots that are "dizzying" or "complex", I'm still excited about Coco. That's not because it's "true Pixar", but because of what it's setting out to do and then some. I'm also excited to see Pixar branch out into other parts of the world, too! How long before we see films of theirs that are set in Africa, Asia, and whatnot?

What say you?

No Longer Bare Bones: 'Coco' Details Surface

After months and months of vague hints and minor announcements, we finally have learned a lot more about Pixar's next original movie...

Directed by long-time Pixarian and Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich, Coco will be the Emeryville studio's take on the Day of the Dead holiday. It's been talked about for years, and it got its concrete release over a year ago. A more detailed plot synopsis is one of the many great tidbits we got today.

"Coco follows the secret musical ambitions of Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village but comes from a family of shoemakers that may be the town’s only music-hating household. For generations, the Riveras have banned music because they believe they’ve been cursed by it; as their family history goes, Miguel’s great-great-grandfather abandoned his wife decades earlier to follow his own dreams of performing, leaving Imelda (Miguel’s great-great-grandmother) to take control as the matriarch of the now-thriving Rivera line and declare music dead to the family forever."

It's interesting how music is going to be worked into this story, but it's been clarified that Coco won't really be a musical. Randy Newman, in an interview, described Unkrich's film as a "musical"... But I guess it's not the case anymore. I've heard hints before this that suggested it wouldn't be a typical musical, either. There will be singing from the cast, we'll hear traditional and original songs, but Pixar - according to Vanity Fair - isn't keen on calling it a musical.

In addition to the plot synopsis, we got a new piece of concept art that gives you a good idea how the final product will look. It is indeed gorgeous...

Voicing main character Miguel is a newcomer named Anthony Gonzalez, he'll be joined by Benjamin Bratt (who previously let it slip that he was part of the cast), Gael Garcia Bernal, and Renee Victor.

There's even more to the released synopsis...

"But Miguel harbors a secret desire to seize his musical moment, inspired by his favorite singer of all time, the late Ernesto de la Cruz (Bratt). It’s only after Miguel discovers an amazing link between himself and De la Cruz that he takes action to emulate the famous singer and, in doing so, accidentally enters the Land of the Dead.

In the beautiful underworld, it’s not long until Miguel encounters the souls of his own family — generations’ worth of long-dead but no less vivacious Rivera ancestors, including great-great-grandmother Imelda. Still, given the opportunity to roam around the Land of the Dead, Miguel decides to track down De la Cruz himself. He teams up with another friendly (and skeletal) spirit — a trickster named Hector, voiced by Bernal — to find De la Cruz, earn his family’s blessing to perform, and return to the Land of the Living before time runs out."

Vanity Fair describes Pixar's version of the Land of the Dead as "a dazzlingly vibrant, stacked metropolis inspired by the Mexican city of Guanajuato". I hope that the film experiments with different styles of CGI, not dissimilar to how The Book of Life threw the CG rule book out the window with glee.

Now right off the bat, this is a very exciting storyline and it has enough to differentiate it from Jorge Guiterrez's visually exciting animated Day of the Dead tale, and it looks to have all that heart and humor. While it all sounds a bit dizzying, let's hope they balance it all out and hopefully explore some dark paths, too. This is Day and the Dead, and the title? It suggests that the actual Coco will be involved, the Coco (one of a few spellings, to my understanding) is a Hispanic folklore monster/bogeyman.

I also think it's the right step for Pixar to take. It looks as if they want to keep challenging themselves when it comes to original stories, especially after the reception the more traditional Brave got. The Good Dinosaur, to me, was more off the beaten path than some might believe. Of course, the inventive Inside Out was praised out the wazoo. Coco looks to be just as ambitious, but I love that they'll be focusing on another culture, because if there's one thing Pixar needs to do more, it's be diverse. So many American and a few European-set stories (Brave, Ratatouille), it's time to explore.

One slight downside for now? Michael Giacchino is doing the score. But wait a minute... Shouldn't I be excited that Giacchino is scoring it? I love Giacchino's work! But... I'd rather they get a Latin composer to do the job. With all due respect to Mr. Giacchino, he is one of the guys who normally scores Pixar's films. If it isn't him, then it's either Randy Newman or Thomas Newman. Few Pixar films used other composers; Patrick Doyle did Brave, and Mychael and Jeff Dana did The Good Dinosaur.

Anyways... I was always looking forward to this for obvious reasons. It's Pixar, it's an original story, it sounds exciting... Now I'm really geared up for it.

What say you?