It didn't seem exacerbated, but I do agree, and hope I won't be disappointed by an overdose of appropriation in the actual film. Sometimes I worry Disney doesn't believe it's okay to JUST craft a complete fantasy about non-caucasian characters and without highlighting some ubiquitous element of the native's culture. It's not wrong to include it, but sometimes it can feel force-fed and trite.
All of us in our lives are influenced by the culture which has surrounded us and which informs our character, values, beliefs, etc. So of course it's not wrong to incorporate it as an element of a greater human story; what concerns me right off the bat with this film is that it seems like an attempt to hone in on a singular, sensational and heavily romanticized outside view of cultural topics which are routinely misrepresented, such that it freezes in place the various dynamics of that culture and the people who belong to it as inevitably exotic and foreign and, as a result, totally vulnerable to exploitation. I can already see the uptick in white chicks donning "sexy Calaveras" for Halloween.
Like, just a few months ago I thought it was super refreshing to see Karla Souza in
Everybody Loves Somebody, playing a brilliant and complicated young woman in present-day Los Angeles, full of toxic sarcasm and self-deprecation yet holding down a demanding job as an obstetrician and having a normal life: sleeping with strangers, going to weddings, falling in and out of love throughout a genuinely funny comedy of errors which doubles as a versatile exploration of biculturalism and which is
pointedly bilingual FFS and yet...where was the coverage for this film? Who heard about it?
I understand the desire for fantasy, but it so often comes at the expense of stories about what real people experience in their day-to-day and I think that ultimately begs the question as to who movies like
Coco are for? Reading Lee Unkrich's comments it's like, yeah, I get it, you're a white dude on a mission and you're "affected deeply" by the material: I just hope he's considered what he's giving back to the communities from which he's drawing inspiration and that he'll use this moment as an opportunity to elevate Latinx voices in Disney and in the film industry at large.
That said, I saw that Renee Victor is playing Miguel's Abuelita (of course she doesn't have a name Mexican grandmas don't have names their birth certificate literally just reads "Abuelita" OK moving on) so I can get behind that. And the cast is 100% Latinx and I'm happy that brown kids are gonna hopefully see a little of themselves in this movie. I just hope it pays its dues to them and their families. Not quite ready to breathe a sigh of relief over stuff as basic as casting the movie appropriately, especially given how Disney has been dragged to this level of awareness kicking and screaming over decades, but yeah.
P.S. Can everyone
stop using the term Hispanic to reference this movie please? Thanks.
