Perfect movie

How would you define a “perfect movie”? My definition is a film that perfectly achieves the goals that it had set out to achieve.

This is actually quite rare. Most films are flawed in one way or another. This can be due to accidents of casting, production schedules, mishaps on set, flawed screenplays, or just the astonishing stupidity of self-important studio execs who try to “fix” a movie, and end up destroying it.

Today I saw a perfect film — Pixar’s Coco. I do not say this lightly. It is quite rare that I see a film which perfectly achieves its goals, without a single misstep.

Of course the subject matter helped. Rather than focus on the shallow culture of these United States, Pixar chose to situate its story in Mexico.

As I’m sure you know, Mexico is a far richer and more mature society than ours. Family connections there are much deeper and more developed, and emotions are undergirded by the resonance that derives from centuries of cultural continuity.

Relatively speaking, we are like little children here in the U.S., playing at being a culture. Mexico has an actual grown up culture, and I suspect they look upon our antics with tolerant amusement.

I was also delighted to see a Pixar film focused on Dia de Los Muertos. We did a version of that theme in our research lab back in 2015, as a collocated immersive Virtual Reality experience.

Here is a link to our take on it.

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