BWW Album Review: COCO Embraces the Power of Music and Tradition

"Never underestimate the power of music," sings "Ernesto de la Cruz" on the soundtrack to the new Disney/Pixar film Coco. And that, at its heart, is the overarching theme of this thoroughly delightful, sometimes surprising story and its accompanying soundtrack. Music here isn't just an accent to the story - it is the story. It's a classic Disney coming-of-age musical tale, but with one crucial difference: instead of the usual Broadway-pop score, it features specifically Mexican music, with songs by Robert Lopez & Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Germaine Franco & Adrian Molina, to tell a story that is both culturally specific and universally human.

The soundtrack opens with Benjamin Bratt as Ernesto singing "Remember Me," a cheery song about death and being remembered. To some, a cheerful song about dying may seem counterintuitive, but the song (penned by the Lopezes) is an ideal introduction to the concept of the Día de Muertos, the Mexican holiday around which the story revolves. In this tradition, dead loved ones are celebrated with great cheer, rather than a day of mourning. Backed by the horns and guitars one would expect to hear in Mexican music, the song narrates the idea that those we love never truly leave us. It's a clever song, simply structured but effective, and one rife with possible layers.

Many of those layers show up in the song's various reprises throughout the album. In the "Lullaby" reprise, the song takes on a softer, gentler mood, bringing out the reassurances of the lyrics that we are never left alone so long as we remember. In the "Reunion" reprise late in the story, it becomes a duet between a dying old woman (Ana Ofelia Murguìa) and a young boy (Anthony Gonzalez). Here, it's neither a cheerful reminder nor a reassuring lullaby, but a promise, as life and death symbolically sing together. And, in the grand tradition of animated movies, a pop version appears in the credits, here sung by Miguel and Natalia Lafourcade.

The rest of the score, mostly by Franco & Molina, lives up to the high bar set by "Remember Me." "Much Needed Advice" provides a chunk of storytelling and introduces the way music itself is mythologized by the film. Narrative and elegant, it function as an effective way in to the important themes and backstory. On the opposite side, another song is structured as a narrative, but in a much more traditional way. "La Llorona," sung entirely in Spanish, tells the folk tale of the Weeping Woman. Alanna Ubach's voice is remarkably expressive - you don't need to understand a word of Spanish to hear the heartbreak in the tale or understand its symbolic relevance to the story.

The story of Coco follows a young boy named Miguel (sung here by Anthony Gonzalez), and his two featured songs nicely delineate his evolution over the course of the movie. "The World Es Mi Familia" is youthful without being juvenile, optimistic but not cloying, and its bilingual lyrics are accessible to English-speaking audiences while clearly establishing the characters' cultural identity as crucial to the story. It's a fairly standard-sounding track, using traditional instrumentation and a lightly skipping compound waltz rhythm to establish Miguel's eagerness to emulate his musical idols. By the end of the film, however, he has developed a bit more of his own style: "Proud Corazon" still uses the signature waltz meter and a hint of folk style, but feels a little more modern and more personal.

It's not just the songs organic to the film that make this soundtrack, though: the second half of the album is filled with Michael Giacchino's instrumental score. With traditional orchestrations that include several types of guitar, trumpets, marimbas, and more, the sound is authentically Mexican and richly layered. From the quirky and chipper "The Newbie Skeleton Walk" to gentler fare such as "A Blessing and a Fessing," most tracks create a distinctive sound and mood, although a few do blur together. All in all, though, Coco is an absolute delight: a soundtrack that tells the story of love, family, and the importance of music to help us live to the fullest.

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