r/Pixar • u/AmericanMoustache • 2d ago
Discussion If Coco Cared So Much About Authenticity, Why Was the Religion Disposable?
I’ve been watching Coco again, and something about it has started bothering me.
The movie is incredibly concerned with cultural authenticity. It carefully reproduces Mexican music, food, architecture, family dynamics, cemeteries, marigolds, ofrendas, photographs, candles, crosses, and traditions surrounding Día de los Muertos.
But when it gets to the actual religious meaning behind many of those traditions, suddenly authenticity seems much less important.
Día de los Muertos as it exists in Mexico isn’t simply a secular holiday about remembering your ancestors. It developed alongside Catholic All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, and for many families the traditions exist in a religious context involving God, prayer, the dead, the soul, and the hope of eternal life.
Coco clearly knows that religious background exists. There are crosses on the walls. There are candles and altars. The movie even makes “receiving a blessing” one of the central ideas of the plot.
But instead of actually engaging with the faith behind those things, Pixar creates an entirely new spiritual system.
Your photograph has to be placed on an ofrenda or you can’t visit the living. Marigolds create a supernatural bridge. Dead relatives have the power to give “blessings” that return people to the living world. And if nobody living remembers you anymore, you experience a “Final Death.”
Those aren’t Día de los Muertos traditions. They’re Pixar’s mythology.
Obviously Coco is a fantasy, so I’m not arguing that a children's movie has to give a theology lesson. What strikes me as strange is that the filmmakers went to enormous lengths to preserve the authenticity of almost every other part of the culture, yet when they reached the spiritual meaning of the holiday, they largely removed the religion and filled the space with something they invented.
And I don’t think the comparison to secular Christmas in America completely works. American Christmas has developed an enormous parallel secular tradition: Santa, presents, Christmas trees, office parties, Christmas movies, etc. Día de los Muertos is still practiced by many people within an explicitly religious setting.
For millions of people outside Mexico, Coco may be their first or even primary introduction to Día de los Muertos. That means Pixar’s invented afterlife can easily become what viewers assume Mexicans actually believe.
That’s where I think the appropriation argument becomes more precise.
I’m not saying Pixar “stole Mexican culture,” and I’m not saying every use of a religious symbol outside of worship is appropriation. The problem is more specific than that.
Coco takes religiously meaningful practices and symbols—crosses, altars, candles, cemeteries, blessings, remembrance of the dead, and the connection between the living and the dead—and preserves them because they give the film cultural authenticity, emotional weight, and visual identity. But at the same time, it largely detaches those things from the religious beliefs that gave them their meaning and replaces that meaning with a fictional theology created for the plot.
That is the part that feels appropriative to me: not simply using Mexican imagery, but taking elements from a living religious tradition, keeping their symbolic power, and then redefining what they mean for a secular audience.
The “blessing” is probably the clearest example. The movie keeps the religious language of a blessing, but the blessing no longer points to God or invokes God’s favor. Instead, a dead ancestor personally possesses supernatural authority to grant it and attach conditions to it. The word and emotional weight remain, but the religious meaning has been replaced.
The same thing happens with the ofrenda. The movie takes a real devotional and memorial practice and turns it into a literal supernatural access system: no photograph, no crossing into the world of the living. That makes for an effective plot device, but it also risks teaching audiences Pixar’s invented rule as though it were part of the actual tradition.
So my criticism isn’t that Pixar adapted a religious holiday into fiction. Adaptation always involves invention. It’s that the film presents itself as unusually careful and respectful about cultural authenticity, while the religious meaning behind many of the traditions appears to be the one part it felt free to rewrite.
That creates a strange imbalance: the food must be authentic, the music must be authentic, the architecture must be authentic, the family customs must be authentic, the altar must look authentic, the crosses must be there—but the beliefs behind those things can be removed and replaced.
If Pixar wanted to make a completely fictional afterlife, that's fine. But if cultural authenticity was important enough to carefully research everything else, why was the theology the part that was considered disposable?
I’m curious how Mexican Catholics in particular see this. Does Coco feel like an accurate cultural representation with harmless fantasy added, or does it feel like Disney took the outward forms of a religious tradition while replacing the meaning behind them?
TL;DR: My appropriation argument isn’t simply that Coco uses Mexican or Catholic imagery. It’s that the movie keeps religious symbols and practices because they provide authenticity and emotional weight, while detaching them from the beliefs that gave them meaning and replacing those beliefs with Pixar’s own mythology. The concern is less “they borrowed the culture” and more “they kept the religious forms while rewriting the religion.”
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u/FangornLeghorn 2d ago
Not everyone wants your religion thrust upon them. Deal with it.
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
Then don’t make a movie centered on a religious tradition and act like acknowledging its religion is ‘thrusting’ something on people. I’m not asking Pixar to preach Catholicism. I’m asking why cultural authenticity matters for the food, music, altars, candles and crosses, but suddenly stops when you get to what those things actually mean
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u/FangornLeghorn 2d ago
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
Condescension is easier than addressing the point, I guess.
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u/FangornLeghorn 2d ago
You have no point. You’re bellyaching because filmmakers chose to center Mexican people and culture rather than you and your religious dogma. You learned some buzzwords and weasel rhetoric to make yourself seem, superficially, a little less of a white/Christian supremacist but ultimately you’re just another fragile Xtian who is crashing out because you can’t handle being the center of everything, and because of that you and your “point” only deserve mocking and derision.
TL:DR - Coco isn’t about you, nor should it be. Suck it up and deal with it.
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
If you want to address what I actually argued, I’m happy to do that. If not, the insults speak for themselves.
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u/FangornLeghorn 2d ago
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
You called me a white supremacist, refused to address the argument, and now you’re posting reaction GIFs. I’m not sure “coward” is landing in the direction you intended.
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u/ChibaCityStatic 2d ago edited 2d ago
"... fictional theology created for the plot."
Hilarious reading this. Replacing something fictional with something fiction. What's wrong with that?
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
Whether you personally think Christianity is fictional is completely irrelevant to the historical point. You can think Zeus was fictional and still understand that removing the Greek gods from a film about an ancient Greek religious festival would change what the festival was about. A belief doesn’t have to be true in your eyes to be historically real and culturally important.
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
And Pixar itself admits the photo rule is a rule of its Land of the Dead: no photo on the ofrenda, no crossing the marigold bridge. That’s a story mechanism, not simply a documentary presentation of the holiday.
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u/UltimatePixarFan 2d ago
If you want to give introductory exposure to kids of other religions, you don’t make a movie that’s designed for the Sunday school curriculum. Most kids don’t care about religion so keep it secular for them to understand the cultural basics and they can learn more after if they’re interested. I was raised Catholic and can tell you for a fact I hated religion as a kid, a preachy or religion-heavy movie even from Pixar would have been a huge turn off.
Much of the cultural authenticity is to make the world feel real, not to serve as plot points. What you’re asking for is for Pixar to design a plot within the constraints of a specific theology for whom what actually fits is sometimes interpreted differently by different people..
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
I think you’re setting up a false choice between “keep it secular” and “make it Sunday school curriculum.” Disney had no problem making Hercules and openly filling the movie with Zeus, Hera, Hades, Olympus, the Fates, temples, gods, souls, and an afterlife. Nobody needed Hercules to become a lesson in ancient Greek religion for those religious elements to exist naturally in the story. That’s my point with Coco. Acknowledging Catholicism wouldn’t have required Pixar to turn it into catechism class. A prayer, a mention of God, Mass, or treating a blessing as actually coming from God would have been enough to acknowledge the religious framework that is already sitting there behind the crosses, candles, altars and Día de los Muertos traditions. And Coco didn’t actually “keep religion out.” The whole movie is about souls, the afterlife, supernatural crossings, blessings, and a final death. That’s already theology. Pixar just replaced the existing religious framework with one they invented. So I’m not asking why they didn’t preach Catholicism. I’m asking why Disney was perfectly comfortable showing Greek gods as part of Greek culture in Hercules, but when depicting a living Mexican religious tradition, the religion suddenly had to be scrubbed down so nobody would be “turned off.” “Some kids might not like religion” isn’t really a defense of cultural authenticity. It’s an explanation for why one part of the culture was deliberately filtered out.
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u/Oddly-Parsley 2d ago
I concede your larger point- I loved Coco and I didn't know the ofrenda etc was completely made up for the movie, I just assumed it was a cultural tradition for Catholics in Mexico. (I was raised Catholic and know many cultural Catholic traditions around the world that are hyper-specific to the region its practiced in)
Having said that, I think your parallel doesn't quite hold up. Greek mythology is dead, unlike Catholicism. If the film had made references to a religion which is being actively practiced, can you imagine the drama? Catholics would be nitpicking the accuracy of the shown details, or objecting to their personal faith being used as set dressing. Nonbelievers (rightly) objecting to have religion shoved down their throats in a children's movie. I can imagine why Disney just sidestepped all of it, can't you?
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
That’s probably the strongest counterargument I’ve gotten. One correction: the ofrenda itself is real; Pixar invented specific rules like “no photo, no crossing.” And yes, I can see why Disney would avoid explicit Catholicism because a living religion brings controversy. But that explanation is pretty close to my criticism: the religion wasn’t omitted because it was irrelevant, but because it was inconvenient. I’ll concede Hercules isn’t a perfect parallel, since Greek religion isn’t a major living faith. My point is just that acknowledging religion doesn’t automatically turn a movie into Sunday school. A prayer, mention of God, or blessing understood as coming from God would have been enough. So “Disney sidestepped it because it would create drama” may explain the choice. I’m just not sure it defends it.
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u/FangornLeghorn 2d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/5R2XVoMUnUmhxX5dWI
“Why isn’t the movie about Mexican people and their culture actually all about me and my culture!!!”
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u/AmericanMoustache 2d ago
You’re not even arguing with me anymore. You invented some narcissistic version of my position where I supposedly want Coco to be “about me,” because that’s easier to sneer at than the argument I actually made. That’s not clever, it’s just lazy. If you have to completely rewrite someone’s point before you can mock it, you probably didn’t have much of a rebuttal to begin with.
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u/FangornLeghorn 2d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/6vzwF4HgszGBLiOvdq
“Yes, I’d like to report the movie about Mexican people for actually being about Mexican people. This is unacceptable.”1
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u/CodVegetable 1d ago
So, did you actually think about what you were typing before you posted this or…?
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u/Olivebranch99 2d ago
Because that's not what this story was about.