Coco and the Effort Behind Art
Okay. I understand that everybody is very busy right now seeing a Star War.
But I’m here (late to the game) to talk about Coco, Disney/Pixar’s carefully researched, loving tribute to Día de Muertos. It’s wonderful, and will — as Pixar films are wont to do — make you cry.
But this article is about something different. It’s about a theme that’s intrinsic to the film, but also a bit meta. It’s about the effort behind art.
Coco touches on this thematically. Our protagonist, Miguel, is an aspiring guitarist. His hero, Ernesto de la Cruz, is all glitz and glamor. He doesn’t put much stock in rehearsal, according to skeleton Frida Kahlo. Neither does he care to (slight spoiler alert!) write his own songs.
Coco places value in the hard work behind art, in the scribbled lyrics and ideas that might not look like much to start. The fruition of that labor, the sold-out stadium? It’s only the tip of a creative process that’s an iceberg.
Art may seem easy and ephemeral. Art is neither of those things.
Art has logistics. Art has a budget. Art has severe constraints. Art often relies on project managers just as much as artists.
Show us the value of creative labor, Pixar.
There was a short immediately before the film (no, not the Olaf one) that struck me as a strange choice. It was a brief overview of the way the animators constructed one of the most stunning shots of the film — the initial view of the city of the dead.
Why give away that stunning shot for the audience? For a minute and a half we were told exactly how many layers of detail had to be painstakingly hand-animated into that single, stunner shot. How many millions (billions?) of lights had to be placed. How many hours it took. How many teams. How much sheer labor.
And sitting there, I realized that Pixar sees us. They see how fast and how cheap we want our entertainment (instant, and preferably free). We want our streaming services no more than $8.99/mo, and for that we want a steady flow of brilliant on-demand dramas. They must be well-acted, flawlessly written, and have cinematic production quality.
Our expectations for animated films like Coco? They might be even more ridiculous. Real people sat and made every last bit of that movie, and we suffer from an inability to comprehend what that means.
We want beautiful art, and we want it to cost $0.
This kind of demand isn’t often a conscious affront to the artist — it’s a result of ignorance. Ignorance, and the pervasive, Pollyanna perspective that artists do it for the love. Which, frustratingly, we do.
I once had a tiff with an office manager who wanted to pay dancers at our company Christmas party shockingly little. She saw their hourly rate and balked. She didn’t know that rate was appallingly low when you consider the time spent building costumes, rehearsing, getting into makeup, traveling to the venue, and the hundreds of hours of rehearsal that our party fee — in such a paltry way — helps support.
I tried to explain it to her at the party, when she saw the dancers decked out and real. Living people, who go home and take their makeup off in rented apartments. She may have realized how wrong she was. But the check had already been cut.
Theatre is a wonderful (read: tragic) example.
In theatre, we’ve accepted that the cost of a ticket can never align with the cost of producing the show. Blockbusters like Hamilton aside, never. Nobody would ever come to a brand new, experimental, play for $200 a ticket (and who could blame them?)
Even respected, successful theatres are nonprofits. They sell tickets and alcohol and then they beg for the rest. People work impossibly hard at every level, often for free.
A team of 10–100 living people come together on a nightly basis to make magic, and patrons want to pay $20 a ticket. If you count the number of seats, multiply by what you paid, and start counting bodies onstage and backstage and front of house, it gets dicey very fast.
At the same time, theatre artists need to see theatre. Children should see theatre, know what it’s about. Their tickets should cost less. What a pickle.
This is an incomplete thought on a puzzle that may not be solvable. I say this just to acknowledge the problem, to shake the sleep from our eyes.
Pixar meant to give us a stiff slap in the face with that short.
As if to say, “Art doesn’t spring from the ground, dummies.”
Behind the scenes, artists struggle. We struggle to articulate the dollars-and-cents need that lurks behind objects invaluable.
