Academy Award-winning director Lee Unkrich and producer Darla K. Anderson have said they welcome the "strong, complicated" female characters in their acclaimed new animated film Coco.
The Pixar movie centres around the annual Mexican holiday Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) as a 12-year-old boy Miguel is accidentally transported to the Land of the Dead and unravels a secret from his family's past.
Many of the film's funniest and most resilient characters are female, including his slipper-brandishing, no-nonsense Abuelita and his late great-great-grandmother Mama Imelda, who built Miguel's family's shoe-making empire.
Producer Anderson said that Mama Imelda in particular resonated with her.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, she said: "She’s a strong, complicated character. We saw a lot of women like that when we were down in Mexico, matriarch’s of the family, and we took a long time to figure out who she might be, so I’m kind of in love with her."
Director Unkrich said he's loves all of the characters so it's hard to pick a favourite, adding: "But the women in the film are great, I was raised by a bunch of strong women so it feels only natural to have Miguel surrounded by strong women in this movie.
Watch out full interview below
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Unkrich and Anderson have been working on bringing Coco to the big screen for the past six years and revealed that they spent a lot of time in Mexico researching the country's culture, traditions and family values in order to create an accurate portrayal on the big screen.
Anderson said of the research process: "We started this film in 2011 and right after we pitched it to the studio and this idea rose to the top, we jumped on a plane and went to Mexico. We went down several times with our crew and we took hundreds of thousands of photographs, we invited some amazing consultants into our process along the way and lastly we have on our team a lot of Latino filmmakers and artists of Mexican heritage or from Mexico so we went to every possible length we could go to make sure this film had as much veracity culturally as possible."
Unkrich added: "One of the great things we did in Mexico in addition to taking lots of photos and travelling around the country is we embedded ourselves with some very beautiful, warm Mexican families who brought us into their homes and let us observe their day-to-day lives and family dynamics and specifically the way that they celebrated Dia de Muertos. A lot of those specificities and great experiences we had ended up getting woven into the story that we were telling."
As well as the exhaustive research that went into making the movie, casting the leading role of Miguel was a key element to getting the project right.
Unkrich admitted it wasn't an easy task to find the right actor to play Miguel, auditioning "hundreds and hundreds" of kids in the US and Mexico before finding Anthony Gonzalez.
"It was very difficult," he said. "It’s very hard, I’ve learned over the years, to find kids who can act. It’s really like finding a needle in a haystack. And with the character Miguel it was more difficult, because not only did I need to find who could act, but he also needed to sing, he needed to be Latino, he needed to be mature enough to be able to handle doing this kind of work but young enough that his voice wouldn’t change in the middle of production."
He added of Gonzalez: "He’s just incredible, the whole movie hangs on him, he’s in pretty much every scene in the entire movie and he was fantastic. He was a joy to work with."
Coco is released in cinemas in Ireland on Friday, January 19.
