Pixar – C-VILLE Weekly

Movie review: Pixar’s Coco is an emotional, musical triumph

Before you ask, yes, you will cry at Coco. No matter how many Pixar movies you’ve seen, no matter how much tolerance you’ve built up to their brand of touching sincerity, and no matter how far into this particular outing you get without shedding a tear, you will have a small puddle at the bottom of your 3-D glasses by the time the movie ends.

Coco is Pixar’s newest effort of injecting magic emotion into every conceivable idea, from inanimate objects (Toy Story, Cars) to creatures in your closet (Monsters, Inc.) to even emotions themselves (Inside Out). Everything we create as humans, and attach meaning to, is fair game, as it should be. A toy is nothing without part of you believing that it’s real, monsters are figments of our overactive imaginations and culminations of our anxieties, and emotions with no human vessel cease to exist. As Pixar’s stories become increasingly abstract and unpredictable, their astounding success appears to be rooted in a keen understanding of why we have emotions at all. Pixar simply taps into the narratives we, as individuals and a society, have already created for ourselves, leaving the studio to simply remind us why they matter.

Coco
PG, 109 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX and Violet Crown Cinema

The story follows Miguel, a young boy in a small Mexican town who comes from a tight-knit family that has dedicated itself to the art of shoemaking for four generations. Miguel is a talented musician, but he keeps his guitar in a secret room along with pictures and videotapes of his favorite musician, Ernesto de la Cruz. Miguel hides his skill and passion because the whole reason the family began shoemaking was as a rejection of music after Miguel’s great-grandfather left to pursue a life in music—singing and playing instruments has been forbidden ever since.

Miguel comes to believe that de la Cruz, the superstar himself, is that very same great-grandfather who left, and that it is his duty to his ancestor to pursue music. So, on Dia de los Muertos—the Day of the Dead, when families honor their members who have passed on—Miguel, against his family’s wishes, goes to borrow de la Cruz’s guitar to compete in a music competition. The guitar is in the singer’s tomb, and when he picks it up, he is transported to a place where the dead actually walk among the living, collecting food and artifacts left for them as part of Dia de los Muertos celebrations. Miguel then has to return to the land of the living before sunrise while also procuring the blessing of his family to pursue music.

Any story involving the memory of loved ones is ripe for emotional exploration, and the fear of being forgotten is possibly more terrifying than death itself. Coco is a terrific celebration of the culture it represents, featuring an A-list cast of Mexican and Mexican-American performers (Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Renée Victor and Edward James Olmos). It condenses the meaning of the holiday then fully embodies it with its story and visuals, without oversimplifying or essentializing. The film follows a few predictable beats, though even the most cynical observer will not be able to resist the power of its emotional resolution. With Coco, Pixar continues to prove that no idea is off-limits to a good storyteller.

Playing this week

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
377 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056

Justice League, Lady Bird, Murder on the Orient Express, The Room, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213

A Bad Moms Christmas, Daddy’s Home 2, Justice League, Lady Bird, Murder on the Orient Express, Roman J. Israel, Esq., The Star, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder

Violet Crown Cinema
200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

Justice League, Lady Bird, Loving Vincent, Murder on the Orient Express, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder

Do the math: Putting emotion into digital motion at Pixar

Tony DeRose, senior scientist at Pixar Animation Studios, wants students to know that the math and science they must learn in school really is helpful. It’s applicable in their activities, games and movies, and DeRose is holding a master class during the Virginia Film Festival to drive home this point. Joining him will be Earl Mark of the UVA School of Architecture and Sara Maloni of the UVA Department of Mathematics, who respectively have published research into digital animation and forms of geometry.

The purpose of the seminar is to “show how various math and science concepts are used in making a Pixar film,” DeRose says. “We’ll pull back the covers to show some of the techniques and disciplines that we use to bring our characters to life and tell our stories.”

Tony DeRose joined Pixar just as the first Toy Story movie was about to premiere. For more than 20 years he was charged with researching problems that needed to be solved so that the worldwide leader in animated films could improve its movies and their emotional impact on audiences.

“Just to see a character on the screen requires a lot of different formulas, and the branches of mathematics, computer science and art have to come together,” DeRose says.

Pixar does much work on improving visuals in the area of physical simulation programs, such as the motion of clothing, water and smoke or the bulging and stretching of muscles. The studio creates animated characters that are stylized and lifelike, but that do not aim to appear precisely as human, DeRose explains.

Special effects in movies with actors, however, have a different challenge when they attempt to create a passable human on the screen, DeRose notes. He gave a hypothetical example of the Star Wars franchise trying to generate a new Carrie Fisher through computer graphics.

“Because humans are so used to looking at other humans, we are attuned to the slightest subtleties,” he says. “It is very hard to create a virtual character that is indistinguishable from the human. It ends up being creepy.” DeRose and colleagues call that quality of creepiness, when you don’t quite get to the real human, the “uncanny valley.”

Asked about virtual reality as it is now, he says it is analogous to the computer graphics field in the mid-1980s. Back then, “we had the feeling computer graphics would be good for science and engineering visualization purposes, but we really hadn’t demonstrated that it could be used for emotional storytelling.” Then in 1986 came John Lasseter, who used computer graphics to make the bouncing lamp and ball movie called Luxo Jr.

“Virtual reality hasn’t had its Luxo Jr. moment yet,” DeRose explains.

In recent months, DeRose has taken on a new role in education and outreach for Pixar. The programs include Pixar in a Box for those interested in exploring and creating, the Young Makers Program and a 10,000-square-foot traveling science exhibition. The payoff is enthusiasm that becomes a vocation.

In leading research at Pixar, DeRose realized how satisfying it can be “to study mathematics and computer science to create software programs to give to artists to turn into something that everyone on the planet might enjoy.”

“Mathematicians rarely get that kind of exposure,” DeRose says. “It’s a chance to touch everyone’s lives.”—Mary Jane Gore

The Luxo Jr. moment

Deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress, Luxo Jr. (1986), a two-minute animated film, was a game changer because of its inaugural use of procedural animation, shadow maps and its ability to convey emotion. Originally intended as a way to demonstrate computer graphic capabilities, the short was the first CGI movie to earn an Academy Award nomination, and the lamp has became a mascot for Pixar Animation Studios.