How Pixar Made Sure ‘Coco’ Was Culturally Conscious (Published 2017) (2024)

When the Pixar writer and director Lee Unkrich received the green light in 2011 to develop his follow-up to “Toy Story 3,” the best picture nominee that made his career, his initial excitement dissolved into fear.

Mr. Unkrich, 50, hadn’t caught sophom*ore jitters. He knew his idea for a new animated film, which eventually became “Coco,” arriving in theaters in the United States on Wednesday, had the same potential for dazzling visuals and emotional catharsis that distinguished “Toy Story 3” and other hits from the Disney-owned studio.

His anxiety was personal. The story of “Coco” centers on Día de los Muertos — the festive holiday celebrated in Mexico to honor the dead — and Mr. Unkrich, who grew up outside Cleveland, is white and has no firm connections to that country or its traditions. He worried that he would be accused of cultural appropriation and see himself condemned to a Hollywood hall of shame for filmmakers charged with abusing ethnic folklore out of ignorance or prejudice.

“The Latino community is a very vocal, strongly opinionated community,” he said by telephone recently. “With me not being Latino myself, I knew that this project was going to come under heavy scrutiny.”

Mr. Unkrich faced a dilemma. On the one hand, he believed that artists should not be restricted to “only telling stories about what they know and their own culture.” But he also needed to safeguard against his ineluctable biases and blind spots, and ensure that his film didn’t “lapse into cliché or stereotype.”

And that was before the rise of President Trump.

The choices made by the director and his collaborators suggest one model for culturally conscious filmmaking at the blockbuster level. On “Coco,” Pixar’s 19th film and the first to feature a minority character in the lead role, Mr. Unkrich largely dispensed with the playbook used to create immersive fictional worlds like those in “Finding Nemo” and “Monsters, Inc.” Instead he relied on several research trips to Mexico and the personal stories of Latino team members, which helped ground his fantasy realm with specific geographic and sociological roots.