A Critic’s Phrase

I didn’t pay much attention when Rise of Skywalker was released. I had already decided, skipping the trouble and expense of actually seeing it, that the movie was better than The Last Jedi but not exactly good. There was, of course, too much talk about the movie to entirely miss it. A word kept recurring in the discussion: nostalgic. It rang critically, and even people who had liked the movie sometimes used the word with an air of apology: It was nostalgic, but … Implicitly and explicitly, the nostalgia of Rise of Skywalker was put in contrast with the subversion of The Last Jedi. The movie wasn’t new, wasn’t different, didn’t try to be revolutionary. It tried to be like the original Star Wars movies – you know, the ones people actually liked.

It was at this time that I realized that I took nostalgic in the opposite sense that the critics meant it. I understood that I was meant to take it as a bad thing. I thought instead that it was, or in any case might be, a good thing. I’ve reflected since that there are other popular critics’ phrases to which I gave a different connotation, and sometimes a different meaning, than they do.

One of these is gritty realism. Somehow this phrase evokes a mental image of dirty concrete, which is not attractive but neither really relevant. As far as I can tell, gritty realism means something along the lines of “entertainment that you probably could not comfortably watch with your grandparents”. It is, perhaps, gritty in a moral sense. But as always in entertainment, the realism is optional and, even when existing, qualified. Much of the violence so lucidly presented by Hollywood is not, thank God, realistic. Gritty realism is generally used positively. But I don’t believe the assertion of realism, and the grit is not in itself impressive.

Feel-good is another well-worn shorthand. Often the term itself is criticism. Even when not exactly derogatory, it is usually condescending. A feel-good movie is well enough in its place, the attitude goes, but it’s not a very high place. Feel-good entertainment is not serious, not deep, not art. I am wholly in favor of that stern, clear-sighted moral point that many things that feel good are, in fact, bad. Yet I can’t agree with the negativity associated with the feel-good label. I don’t see why art that makes people feel good should be any lower than art that makes people feel bad. And do you know, I sometimes watch movies with the deliberate object of being made to feel better, and I do not dismiss entertainment because it is “feel-good”.

Here’s another one whose promise never moves me: action-packed. This has been used as a recommendation something like a million times. And I believe it. I also believe that being action-packed is the leading flaw of many action movies. I am not going to fault action movies for having action, but I think they could leave more time for the characters to do other things, like think. In some movies there is barely enough plot to string the chase sequences and fight scenes together. Action-packed? Yes. Always, these days. But is there anything more?

What the People Want

You have to take success where it comes, even if it happens to come on Netflix. That can be a little galling if what you really wanted was success on the silver screen, all across the United States. I learned that from Martin Scorsese, who has received a great deal of acclaim for The Irishman but wanted, in addition, a good, long theater run.

There was no room for him in the theater. This, at least, is Scorsese’s read on the situation. As he explained,

[T]he fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.

Scorsese is making two points here. Both are interesting; one is correct. He is saying, first of all, that franchise movies are not overwhelming our theaters because that is simply what people want. This statement rides on the implicit belief that the public taste is broader than that, that people can – and would, if Hollywood chose to offer them – enjoy films that break the ascendant formulas.

That belief does Scorsese credit. In the first place, it’s a compliment to his audience. In the second, it lays hands on a critical truth. Hollywood makes so much of its franchises and its formulas because they’re safe, not because they’re all the movie-going public wants. The studios are gambling millions on every film; naturally they are averse to unique formulations that have not been tested against public taste. But people are ready to enjoy, and to pay for, more than the current fads.

Still, it must be granted that the franchises and formulas are safe because people really do like them. Here we reach Scorsese’s second point. Scorsese argues that people want franchise films because they are given franchise films. No doubt Hollywood does help to create the demand it supplies. No doubt it doesn’t do so to the extent that Scorsese suggests. It is, as the cliche goes, a free country. The paying public is constantly allowing movies to hit the theater and flop. Why not the movies that so grieve cultured filmmakers?

Because people want those movies. At least, they want that sort of movie, and they will forgive failures in art to get it. This is a truth that critics, and artists with the souls of critics, have a tendency to miss: In terms of enjoyment, type matters as much as quality. If it’s comedy you want, then even bad comedy will do more for you than tragedy. The popularity of the franchise doesn’t prove that the movies are good. It doesn’t even prove that the public thinks the movies are good. But it does prove that the public wants them.

It is very profitable to find what people want and sell it to them. The whole aim of the franchise is to give the people what they want, and it hits the mark more often than not. Scorsese is wrong to believe that Hollywood creates the demand by supplying it. But he is right to believe that people want more than the franchise and the well-tried formula, that there is space yet for the different and bold. The public always holds surprises. You never know what people might like, or love, and even – for that is the way of things – turn into a new franchise.

Frozen II: They Tried

Given Frozen‘s smashing success, and Disney’s philosophy regarding capitalization of past successes, Frozen II was almost a mathematical inevitability. Now the deed’s done and the movie’s out. The good news is, they tried.

Frozen II strikes out into new territory. It expands its world with history and with mythology, though with the inadvertent effect of making Arendelle look … small. (It is a question for political scientists: Can it be a kingdom if it can all fit on a cliff?) Frozen II wisely preserves Anna’s and Elsa’s gains. Their relationship, though not entirely seamless, is fully restored. Even their parents – who, with such loving intentions, almost destroyed their daughter in the first movie – are softened in this second telling with the emphasis that they really did love. In this way, Frozen II provides a welcome kind of catharsis for its predecessor.

At the same time, it moves the characters onward from their ending-places of the last film. The movie’s first song invokes a theme of change and the whole story plays out in deep autumn, the imagery of change. The autumn setting also allows a refreshed, brighter palette beyond the white and blue that dominated the first film. Indeed, the film’s strongest element is its visual artistry. So much of the movie – from the fall grandeur to the exploding magic of Ahtohallan – is a pleasure to behold. Other sequences stand out for their excellence – Elsa’s unburial of Ahtohallan‘s secrets, Olaf’s hilarious retelling of Frozen, Anna’s moment of resolution in crisis.

There is real merit in these scattered elements of Frozen II. But the story never unites them into a comprehensible whole. (Fair warning: From here on in, this review is replete with spoilers – but you don’t care, do you?) Magic heaves through the story, but there is no making sense of its operations. The magic slingshots, at the convenience of plot, from being wild and heedless, like a force of nature, to being focused and merciful, like a benevolent deity. This incoherence muddles the whole story. If Ahtohallan calls Elsa, why does it attempt to kill her for answering the call? If the Enchanted Forest hates the dam to the point of destroying Arendelle, why does it never have a go at destroying the dam itself? How does a person become a spirit?

The movie makes a great point of uncovering a painful family secret. The pain is largely mitigated, however, by two factors: (1) The secret principally involves dead people nobody cares about; (2) It is inexplicable. The skeleton in the royal closet is that Elsa’s grandfather treacherously gave unto the Enchanted Forest people … a dam. As treacherous gifts go, this lacks imagination; not a lot of subtlety is possible with a dam. And this wasn’t some cheap, logs-on-rocks dam. It was a stone behemoth. It was the Hoover Dam of vaguely magical, vaguely Scandinavian kingdoms. Its nature as a dam was exceedingly obvious. It should not have taken any strenuous mental exertion to forecast the result of the dam being a dam. Yet only by magic and near-death is the shocking secret exposed: The dam was a Trojan horse in that it blocked the water. I thought about this too long, and now it’s funny.

But Frozen II was made for children, and no doubt they like it better than I do. Frozen II has flares of creativity and even a kind of emotional wisdom. Its confused plot and incoherent mythology leave it uneven. Taken altogether (as all things must be), the movie is all right. Probably it is even good, if you spare it close examination and just enjoy it.

The Arc and the Epilogue

In the beginning, Pixar made Toy Story, and it was good.

Then Pixar made Toy Story 2, and it was very good.

And Pixar made Toy Story 3, and it was good enough until the last twenty minutes, when it became very good.

And Pixar said, “Let us make sequels, for therein lies boatloads of easy money, plus we have no ideas on the drawing board except one about a ‘newt’, which is apparently a lizard that looks we assume much like other lizards, except the ones that prey on tourists in Australia.” And so Pixar made Toy Story 4.

And Toy Story 4 was …

… Good.

And this was surprising.

I had no faith when Toy Story 4 was announced. I marked it, without any particular emotion, as another sign that Pixar had sold its birthright for a mess of pottage. Nonetheless, I went to see it when it came out. Even Pixar’s mediocre efforts are solidly pleasant, and just because I know their game of nostalgia doesn’t mean I won’t play. I got more than I came for; I thoroughly enjoyed Toy Story 4. It is true, though possibly faint praise, that Toy Story 4 is easily the best Pixar movie since Inside Out.

I have two principal convictions regarding Toy Story 4, not entirely congruous or contradictory. The first is that Toy Story 4 is a genuinely good movie, more enjoyable in most ways than Toy Story 3. The movie is bright, spirited, clever. Forky, its most ingenious creation, perfectly binds existential dilemmas with sunny humor – a flash of the old Pixar brilliance. It reuses ideas from the older Toy Story films, notably the villainous unloved toy and the sinister organization of Sunnydale. Yet it reuses the ideas with such virtuosity that the earlier incarnations seem like first drafts of this final, perfected version. Toy Story 4 possesses a fleetness that even Toy Story 3 lacked.

My second conviction is that Toy Story 4 demonstrates conclusively that the arc of the Toy Story films is finished. More, it demonstrates that the films, in moving beyond Andy, have lost something central and irreplaceable. The toys spent the first three films on adventures away from Andy, but the point was always to get home to him. What united the three movies into a trilogy was a thematic idea and an emotional arc. Toy Story drew the first, straightforward line: the purpose Andy gave to his toys, and the love they returned. Toy Story 2 drew the curve: the purpose would inevitably end; the love, probably also. Toy Story 3 finished the arc: the purpose completed, the story ended.

Toy Story 4 throws nostalgic glances back at the story, but it can’t connect to it. It can’t continue the arc. A better movie than Toy Story 3 through most of its runtime, it never achieves the emotional power of that movie’s best moments. It even seems a testimony to the orbital pull of Andy’s love that in this, the first film without him, the toys drift away from each other. Toy Story 4‘s disconnection from the arc of the preceding Toy Story movies might not be a loss. But it is a lack.

If you view it in the right mood (probably a generous mood), you can take Toy Story 4 as a kind of epilogue to its predecessors. No, there won’t be another Andy for Woody. But there will be other things. Whatever view you take, the cleverness and sheer fun of Toy Story 4 are winning. I enjoyed it, and that’s all you can really expect from the theater.

Still, I have a conviction that if Pixar makes Toy Story 5, it will not be good. It’s time to let Toy Story rest in peace. Even the epilogue has been written, after all.

A Broadened Horizon

Recently I started getting into Marvel movies. (Yes, I know. Next decade I’m going to discover video streaming services. You’ll want to be around then.) I had been aware of them for years, like everyone else on the planet, and I had even been induced to watch a few. They were very close to me, the people who persuaded me to try Marvel, and so they didn’t mind that I brought my laptop to the experience. It proved an excellent diversion.

The subtle drift of all this is that I am not what marketing specialists would call “the target audience.” The whole idea of superheroes, comic books, and comic book superhero movies left me cold. I thought it all a little goofy, a little too cartoonish: the costumes, the tights, the poundingly obvious names. These prejudices – and that is what they were, because they were not based on any substantive experience with the thing itself – these prejudices deadened my interest.

Nor, in truth, did my initial viewings jump-start it. The movies were not terrible, of course, but neither were they anything I felt impelled to see. The fighting scenes, with their 84,000 punches thrown, seemed interminable and the movies altogether too long (though in fairness, most movies are these days). I thought the franchise put a premium on action over character and wittiness over profundity. I think much the same now; at least, these are the weaknesses to which the franchise trends, and some movies surrender more to them than others.

But if my estimation of the franchise’s weaknesses is the same, my estimation of its strengths has changed. I will say the movies are more enjoyable once you piece things together and your brain stops going What so much. The talent invested in them is plainly enormous, much like the budget. But what I came most to appreciate – the true inspiration of my newfound interest – was the Cap and Loki. I may be cold to the appeal of comic books, and I may be bored by explosions and CGI monsters, but I love good characters. The Cap is my favorite kind of hero. Loki is my favorite kind of villain – and my favorite kind of anti-villain, and my favorite kind of anti-hero. Once invested in the characters, I want to know the story; I want to see the movies.

A happy fact to be drawn from all this: It is possible to overcome a viewer’s (or reader’s) prejudices and even, to some extent, his natural tastes through excellency. Good for creators, because they can win unlikely admirers; good for the rest of us, because we can have our horizons broadened to new enjoyment. Snobs think that superior taste is proved by its narrowness, but some things are gained by the wider view.

It’s a limited grace. Natural tastes can only be stretched so far, and defied even less. All my enjoyment of Thor: Dark World has not translated into a twitch of interest in Captain Marvel. I will never be a Marvel enthusiast, but I am showing up.

Even if it’s mostly for Loki’s beautiful face. And the Cap’s.

The Key to Power

In my last time around, I argued that Mary Poppins Returns is not a retread of the original film but a second, rhyming verse. Today I will concede that it is still not as good as the first. Mary Poppins Returns never quite achieves the wit or the heart of its classic forerunner. The pathos of Mary Poppins is deeper and truer even while its tragedies are so much slighter; the film makes more of a father’s distraction than its sequel does of a mother’s death. It is worth examining why.

Paradoxically enough, Mary Poppins achieves its power because, and not in spite of, the fact that it scales its tragedy to the every day. For a mother to die while her children are still small is the tragedy of a lifetime; for a man to forget what is really important is the daily weakness of humanity. The sadness of Mary Poppins is the sadness of forgetting, of misunderstanding and being misunderstood, of suddenly realizing how time flies away. It’s not high tragedy. But it’s near to everyone’s life.

The afflictions of the Banks family in Mary Poppins are more universal than those of the new Banks family in Mary Poppins Returns. But more important than the films’ basic ideas is their development. The writers of the first movie were more skilled and subtle in handling their material. Notice how gradual and inarguable is George Banks’ character progression: comically oblivious at the beginning; unexpectedly sympathetic in the second act, a grown-up with no one to look after him in his cage; and finally, at the climax, he becomes the very heart of the story, in his despair at his shattered ambitions and the courage of his lonely walk through the nighttime streets of London.

Nothing in Mary Poppins Returns entirely equals the power of that walk, or of Bert’s gentle admonition of both father and children. The film is not without its own power. There are moments of real tenderness in it, anchored around the family’s grief. Yet what resolution the story offers is artificial, and as such it neither satisfies nor finds its way into real depths. When the film attempts to create comfort in the wake of death, it simply pulls the standard Hollywood pieties off the shelf.

Now the essence of the Hollywood creed on death – at least when Hollywood wants to be heartwarming – is that the dead are not really gone. This is another way of saying that death is not death. It always feels so false. Mary Poppins Returns presents a great tragedy and denies that it’s really as bad as all that. The earlier movie, in its better wisdom, took a lighter grief and told the truth, and through the truth it found power.

Storytellers like to go for the heart-strings. All heart-strings are fair game, even the easy and obvious ones. Just don’t underestimate the potential of small griefs and mundane troubles. And whatever grief you choose, remember that the key to its power lies in telling the truth about it.

Mary Poppins, Second Verse

When Disney released Mary Poppins Returns – a sequel 55 years coming – I had such faith that I waited to see the film until it had been released on DVD. If I had realized how closely and consciously the sequel paralleled the original, my faith would have been even less. It is, then, with some astonishment that I report that the parallelism worked and was, in fact, one of the film’s best aspects.

You should understand that this is contrary to my instincts. Of all the things that make sequels a bore, the tendency to retread the original leads the pack. As for remakes, there is no point to their existence if they retell instead of revise. Yet Mary Poppins Returns built itself by the plumb line of Mary Poppins, and in that decision it succeeded. This unlikely success was, I think, made by two principal factors.

Crucially, Mary Poppins Returns threads the needle of paralleling the original without mirroring it. As you know, parallelism is the art of pleasing correspondence. There can be a fine line between that and repetition, especially in parallelism’s more elaborate forms. Mary Poppins Returns stays on the right side of that line, with much credit due to the fact that it has the flavor of emerging from the same universe as the original Mary Poppins. I don’t know enough of the P.L. Travers books to know whether Cousin Topsy, the leeries, and the adventure “in china” are inspired by them. But they feel as if they might have been. You feel, within the films, that they are similar because they belong to the same world, where London’s cobbled streets twist into nooks where relatives defy physical laws and proper Victorian nurseries contain worlds hidden in plain sight on the mantelpiece.

Emily Blunt’s delightful performance gives significant support to the movie’s cause. Wisely declining to imitate the inimitable Julie Andrews, Blunt offers a different interpretation of Mary Poppins: less sugar, more spice. Yet it is still Mary Poppins, more of the books than of the classic movie. Blunt adds the distinction, retains the similarity. Mary Poppins still glides through – and over – the world with command and self-possession. And if she is sharper now than when we first met her, still that sharpness was present before; if she was more tender then, that tenderness is yet found now.

The primary reason that the parallelism succeeds as it does is that it is an eternal part of the idea of Mary Poppins. In the first movie, Mary Poppins archly reminds Michael and Jane of all the children she has said good-bye to. Bert – ever canny in the ways of Mary Poppins – is no more surprised to see her go than he was to see her come, and he closes the movie with his farewell: “Don’t stay away too long.” This is simply what Mary Poppins does, simply who she is: alighting where she pleases, working magic and chaos, and all in the spirit of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. Bert assures us that what is about to happen in Mary Poppins has all happened before. Mary Poppins Returns shows us it all happening again.

Mary Poppins Returns succeeds in its imitation because it does not repeat the original film; it rhymes with it. In well-executed rhyme, the sameness of structure and certain sounds is a pleasing thing. We understand, moreover, that Mary Poppins doesn’t really end or begin. We have, in these two films, neither beginning nor ending, but two verses in a song that plays mostly outside our hearing.

Favor the Franchise

If you pay attention to Hollywood today, you have probably noticed that western civilization is in the latter stages of spiritual and intellectual degeneration. You will also have noticed, by the by, that most of Hollywood’s output these days consists of (a) franchise movies, (b) movies based on pre-existing cultural artifacts, such as books, comics, other movies, theme park rides, and decades-old Disney cartoons, and (c) franchise movies based on pre-existing cultural artifacts like books, comics, etc. The percentage of such derivative works in Hollywood’s modern oeuvre has been estimated as high as 99 percent, but it might be as low as 96 percent.

So Hollywood is not terribly original these days. But the reliance on franchise is not a phenomenon isolated in Hollywood. The adventuresome reader seeking out a new book by a new author must be careful – careful that he doesn’t end up picking book 3.25 in an eleven-book series, finale coming out next spring. (By the way, decimal books: a thing.) (Decimal movies, too.) It is possible, with sequels and spin-offs and a faithful public, to make an entire career of one story. A standalone book is an increasingly rare bird.

Movie studios favor the franchise for the same reason that book publishers do: money. It must be admitted that this is a sensible reason, particularly in the case of movie studios. When you’re pouring out money in the tens of millions for a single film, you want a sure thing. How do you know people will like your newest project? Well – they liked the last one, didn’t they? It is a well-worn axiom that the sequel is never quite as good, but that does not prevent the sequel from inheriting the audience of its predecessor.

That truth brings us to another significant fact: People do not seem to easily tire of the franchise. Publishers and studios are looking for a profit, and audiences give it to them. Diminishing quality ultimately ends in diminishing financial returns, perhaps even in the death of the franchise – but along that road a great deal of money is given up to mediocre and even poor installments. Franchises depend on the powerful attraction of effective stories. You never want your favorite story to end, and the characters who have inspired more emotion than half of the real people you know – it is hard to let them go. The desire for the story to go on, the curious attachment to non-existent people, sustains the franchise.

And yet maybe it all is a little too much. Beyond the bankruptcy of individual franchises, we have been trained to a certain insouciance regarding the endless sprawl of connected films. Of course they’re making a sequel. There is, too, a downgrading of regard for those who seem too inclined to revisit old ideas; Pixar toppled from the creative heights when it discovered the sequel, and no one counts on Pixar’s annual offering being one of the film highlights of the year anymore. This, then, is what I would like to know: Does the paying public want more standalones and more variety, or are we content with franchises as long as they are well-maintained?

More Is (Not) Better

There is a moment in The Last Jedi that evokes the famous Battle of Hoth: the pursued, outnumbered rebels, in the temporary shelter of their fortress; the gleaming, mechanized army of the New Order; the battle lines drawn across the snow. You recognize the battle about to be commenced, and you can’t help but feel a measure of amazement that not only is the movie still going on, it evidently intends to go on for at least another half hour.

Excessive running times are one of the annoyances of modern movies. They’re a particular hardship in bad movies, of course, where (to paraphrase the great C.S. Lewis) length of minutes is only length of misery. But they dampen good movies, too, stirring up restlessness just when the story is rousing itself to its climax. There is the rare movie that can extend to behemoth lengths without losing power or charm, but the key word in this statement is rare.

The length of movies is constrained by the inherent nature of movies. Movies, first created exclusively for theaters, are designed to be experienced in one sitting; in the theater it is impossible to stop the show and come back later, and even in the home it tends to spoil the effect. Now, human beings can only stay seated for so long. The time that they want to stay seated is even less. Movies that run on too long will end up competing with various biological impulses pinging in the brain: move, get up, stretch, think about dinner, you’re hungry, you’re thirsty, you know where the bathroom is in this place? This is not a battle that movies easily win.

Permissiveness toward movie lengths creates two negative dynamics, one in the creators and one in the audience. Creators are freed to bigger and more ambitious projects, but they are also freed to self-indulgence and lax workmanship. If you are forced to cut, you cut the worst, and if you are allowed to expand, you expand to the worst. It takes only a little experience of movies to know that audiences get more below-par scenes than we do gems from extended running times. Think of those disappointing trips through the bonus features, where you watched the missing scene and then quietly reflected to yourself, “So that’s why it was cut.”

Long movies create a different dynamic within the audience. They often lower the audience’s tolerance; a two-and-a-half hour movie must work harder to justify itself than a movie that ends well short of two hours. Certain types of missteps, and even disappointments, are magnified. If you found the action sequences repetitive, if the dialogue rambled, if you thought that side-quest to the casino enragingly pointless, and the movie was 40 minutes longer than it was required to be – couldn’t they have cut it?

A popular justification of long movies calls it giving the audience its money’s worth. Yet quality, and not length, makes the show worth the price. It is a well-publicized truth, all childish measurements aside, that more is not always better. And so a request to the creators, if they will have it: When you find yourself able to extend a film well past the two-hour mark, consider carefully: Should you?

A Fatal Flaw

Amid all the sequels Pixar has been rattling off the assembly line, last year’s Coco comes as something of a relief: original and visually brilliant, funny and tender in the good old Pixar way. Disney can’t handle two living parents; Pixar can handle a whole clan, in the capable, work-roughened hands of a fiery matriarch. Despite its strengths and its appeal, Coco is undermined by the vision it presents of the afterlife.

The vision unfolds along with the story. Our first glimpse is a gorgeous cityscape made of color and lights – the Land of the Dead, shimmering beyond the mortal world. The unearthly appearance of the Land of the Dead is quickly juxtaposed by the bureaucratic procedures that surround entering and leaving it. The dead themselves hustle about on humdrum activities – working, traveling, eating and drinking, going to talent shows and arguing with customer service. They do much what they did in life, only they do it without skin. On some level, this is a pleasing incongruity; on another, it is a letdown. Why go to all the trouble to die if life just goes on the same?

It is revealed that death resembles life in still another way: You are going to die, this time the final death. All these skeletons will die of being forgotten. As they and their stories pass out of the memories of the living, they will be afflicted with spasms of weakness and pain before they finally collapse into dust. Some people will be kept alive in the Land of the Dead for years upon years, as long as their stories are still told among the living. Others must have a very short stay. Here we begin to sight the marrow-deep injustice of the vision, but it comes clear only later.

The villain in the Land of the Dead lives in luxury – gratis, we are told, of his admirers, who heap him with gifts on the Day of the Dead. And we see the old murderer in his celebrity and wealth, and think of the poor forgotten skeleton shivering into the final death, and we know …

There is no justice in the end. None at all. Your career, bred in the abuse of others, may be halted in life, but you will just resume it in death. Sell your soul to get this world and the next will be thrown in, too. Meanwhile, the unwanted, the unloved, the outcast and the forgotten – they are forever the losers. All the inequities of this life are transferred into the next. Indeed, new inequities are created by the fact that the dead can visit the living only through the possession and display of a material object. This opens, too, avenues of revenge, ways that the living can spite the dead and be sure they will know it.

Think of it: Even after you die, they can still get you.

All of this would be bearable if we could imagine that the Land of the Dead was only a stopping-place on the way to some other destination. The movie throws a bone in this direction, one skeleton shrugging that no one knows what happens after the final death. But the fact that they call it final hints at what they think. The story’s happy ending – Now you get to live as a skeleton in the Land of the Dead indefinitely! Pop the champagne! – makes it clear that no one has a better end in mind.

Coco presents an appalling vision of the afterlife. It would be easier to take if the movie knew it was appalling, but it doesn’t. Coco’s dreary afterlife drags down the whole story with a faint sense of depression, a subtle distaste. It’s well enough to imagine that the Land of the Dead is, but to imagine that it is all there is – that is the fatal flaw.