Director Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3) is certainly not the first director to make a film about Dia de los Muertos, but he’s the first to give it that Pixar touch. The first teaser trailer for Coco, featuring an all-Latino voice cast, reveals the animation giant’s lush musical jaunt through the Land of the Dead, led by newcomer Anthony Gonzalez.
The first dazzling footage previews the story of Miguel (Gonzalez), whose obsession with music far outweighs his family’s confounding generations-long ban on the craft. Dreaming of becoming a performer, the young boy visits the resting place of his idol, Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt), where he borrows the guitar hanging above his grave. However, because it’s the Day of the Dead, his actions propel him into the Land of the Dead where he’ll meet his great-great-relatives and learn the mystery of his family.
“At the end of Toy Story 3, we had this moment where Jessie turns on the boom-box and the Gipsy Kings do a Spanish language version of ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me.’ Which, it turned out, ended up being a real precursor to this movie,” Unkrich told EW of Coco. “The day John Lasseter gave the thumbs up for this movie, I immediately felt this huge weight drop onto my shoulders because I knew that we were doing something different than we had ever made at the studio,” he added, “and that for the first time, we were going to have this enormous responsibility to do right by this culture and not lapse into stereotype or cliché.”
Monsters University story artist Adrian Molina co-directs Coco, which is produced by Darla K. Anderson. The voice cast also includes Gael García Bernal as a mischievous skeleton named Hector who helps Miguel on his journey.
Coco opens in theaters this Nov. 22. Watch the teaser trailer above.
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