I’m a little slow at watching new film releases. But since Coco won the Best Animated Feature at the 2018 Academy Awards, and my youngest granddaughter is staying with us for a while, I figured it was time to purchase the film and take a look. I can now understand why it has been so well received by audiences and critics alike. One of the most significant aspects of it for me has been the focus of several news stories (such as this one here), and that is its treatment of death. It draws upon the Mexican Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos), which makes for an interesting study in its own right, and in contrast with America’s Halloween celebration. I’ve commented on this previously in an old blog post of mine elsewhere, and I’ll copy it here with modifications.

We can trace the historical and cultural origins and development of Halloween, from its earliest antecedents in Pagan Samhain as an agricultural and mythical festival, to the influence of Catholic All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day, to its continued development in North America as a form of public pranking and significance in courtship rituals expressions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Halloween continued to develop in response to the cultural and subcultural contexts of America, it eventually became influenced by popular culture, particularly in the 1970s through the horror film genre. Today it is increasingly popular, and functions as a means for children and adults alike to engage in costuming, identity exploration, and social inversion, existing largely as a secularized and consumer driven pop culture phenomenon far removed from any religious or spiritual aspects of previous Pagan influences.

The Mexican Day of the Dead is very different. This is a deeply religious celebration with some similarities to Halloween in the form of costuming, street requests for sweets and foods, and engagement with issues related to death, but the differences far outweigh the similarities. Celebrations include the making of sweets and special foods (such as “Bread of the Dead” and sugar skulls), the creation of family altars for the dead (ofrendas), and visits to grave sites. For Mexicans the Day of the Day is a marker of ethnic identity which encompasses festival, symbol, and ritual as a means for families and communities to both mock death and embrace it as a reality of life while also facilitating the continuing bond between the living and deceased ancestors.

As much as I am passionate about Halloween, we should also note the strong contrasts between Halloween and the Day of the Dead in North American and Mexican cultures. In America the Halloween celebration functions on a superficial level in the culture in ways that entertain aspects of popular culture from an individualistic perspective as participants engage in costuming and identity play. But the secular Halloween celebration really does not deeply and meaningfully engage death. By contrast, the Mexican Day of the Dead provides a religio-cultural festival for individuals and the culture to engage the reality of death and the continued connection of the living and the dead through a rich reservoir of symbol and ritual. It would seem that North Americans can learn a lot from our neighbors to the South in terms of cultural festivals. As stated in the article in The Independent:

Our relationship to the dead is a key theme of Coco, introducing us to the concept of the “final death”. Those who reside within the colourful, bountiful Land of the Dead can do so only as long as there is someone to remember them in the Land of the Living; once that last memory is lost to time, that individual – quite literally – fades into nothingness.