Sunday Film Review - Coco: no place like home |《寻梦环游记》: 死亡，记忆与归乡

看完《寻梦环游记》的人可能或多或少会觉得，自己被这个中文译名戏耍了：听上去不像是一部会让人泪目的电影。但哪怕是对情节不以为然的观众也承认，在影片的某些节点，飙泪冲动会有些难以抑制。

有人说，这是影片情感把握到位的证据；也有人说，这只不过是迪士尼赚取廉价眼泪的套路。无论你更倾向于哪种结论，超过十亿人民币的票房说明，《寻梦环游记》在中国取得了商业上的成功。在商业成功背后，则是影片和绝大多数观众的一拍即合：它说出了它想说的东西；观众也认同了它的表达方式。

影片始于梦想，但结局却比梦想更为复杂。虽然墨西哥“亡灵节”在中国并非广为人知（现在或许已经流传开来），但文化的隔阂并没有湮没观众的热情；相反，影片的商业成功说明，异域风情背后若隐若现的是中国观众并不陌生的价值观：传统，家庭以及个人和家庭之间的纠葛与妥协。

在影视艺术范畴中，动画片“人不像人”的表现手法距离世界的物理真实最为遥远。神奇的是，夸张的画面往往能让我们突然重新意识到日常生活中熟视无睹的细节。

按照今天电影市场“推陈出新”的速度，金球奖和奥斯卡过后，《寻梦环游记》可能不会在人们的记忆里停留很长时间，让影片的主题曲“Remember Me”显得有些无力。

不过，这可能也让我们关于“死亡，记忆和生命”的探讨更有趣味吧。

Sadness suddenly sinks in as your heart beats to the up and downs of the story unfolding before you, moving you to the brink of collapse so quickly that the attempt at suppressing your emotional turbulence comes to no avail. No sooner does the sharp intake of your breath give way to a controlled choke than you burst into tears along with dozens of strangers as the tune, Remember Me, echoes in the theater again. Darkness is your only protection. 

In a similar manner all across China, Coco has melted the hearts of millions as the animated feature film by Disney’s Pixar tells a boy’s adventure into the afterlife to square his dream with his family’s expectation.

The experience of shedding tears in the cinema is always memorable; if not rarer these days as viewers and critics continue the tradition of blaming the flat emotional appeal of today’s cinema films on the commercial production system that serves no other purpose than of financial gain.

This has made the box office success of Coco even more of a surprise in China, where big budget superhero films and light-hearted metropolitan romances dominate the preferences of the average moviegoer.

On the Chinese film-review websites Douban and Mtime, the country’s answers to Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, reviewers rushed to share their tearful memories about the film, eventually voting it as the best of its category in 2017. 

The film’s financial success is historic. Since its release last November, Coco took its place as the second best-selling Disney feature animation in the country with a box office total of 177 million US dollars by the end of last December, overtaking Frozen (2014) and second only to Zootopia (2016). 

 记忆：生命的延展 

电影中，死亡不是绝对终结，而换成另一种形式的存在。连接起两个世界的，是生者对于亡者的记忆，支撑这种世界观的，是亡灵节的背景。

死亡是一个沉重的主题。但作为一部追求老少咸宜的作品，《寻梦环游记》用华丽的色彩、丰富的细节淡化了死亡的冲击。同时，影片的画面设计隐去了现代元素，模糊了故事的时间背景，让“记忆”的载体是各个年龄层都不陌生的事物：烛台、照片、录影带。

所有这些设计都包含了一抹淡淡的“思乡情节”（Nostalgia）。在这样的情绪中，家庭和传统的意义不言自明。

Against the Mexican backdrop of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a story synthesizing the oft-seen sentimental ingredients that lend global appeal to a typical Disney production, such as aspiration and growing up through pain. 

But it’s by no means the first Disney film that features a rebellious child. Finding Nemo was received fairly well in China back in 2003. As for stories with aspirational child protagonists who had fraught relations with their parents, Brave (2012) and Moana (2016) left a fleeting fuss in the Chinese market, too. 

What’s special about Coco for Chinese fans is the rather deep approach to subjects such as “death and memory,” which loom like ghosts amidst the caricature of bone-tossing skeletons populating the afterlife in the film.

“What a wonderful thing it would be if ancestors’ ghosts could call upon us the way same they do in the film!” One viewer said on Mtime. 

For Chinese viewers, the world of the dead depicted in the film shares a familiar common ground, though patchy, with the idea in Chinese mythology that often paints a more horrifying picture of the afterlife. But the film’s flowery mirroring of the afterlife to the living world, including the warm color in which the city of death is painted, with similarities to the world of the living, offers a more cheerful interpretation of death that softens what could have been a rather bleak subject matter.     

The concept of “in the living’s memory populates the last shred of the dead” is novel from the Chinese point of view. But in a nostalgic fashion, the film’s representation of memory has succeeded in touching Chinese filmgoers. 

In the scenes where the frame on the terrace displays photos of the deceased with white flames shivering on white candles in front and the shabby television wired to VCR, there is almost no trace of the 21st century. Memory is represented in a way that harks back to the “good old days” of the pre-mobile phone era free of the touch of modern technology in the minds of the viewers.  

The nostalgic mood floating in a vaguely bygone time helps set the scene for the message to which the film holds dear in order to convey: the value of family, which is widely recognized as the X factor that won over most Chinese viewers. 

The film’s logic is simple but forceful. Family ties are the most powerful force that holds human beings together in the world, so powerful in the film that family love, through memory, also mediates between the living and the dead. By giving memory the concrete form of a bridge connecting the living world and the afterlife, the film materializes the idea that memory is an extension of life, the universal appeal of which would hardly go unnoticed in Chinese society, which still values reverence to tradition, ancestors and the wisdom that the two embody.    

 思乡：回不去的过往 

影片中的家庭是中国曾见的“四世同堂”模式。随着中国经济的发展，社会流动性越来越强，越来越多的人选择离开家乡去外地发展。渐渐地，这种家族体系开始为城市中的“三口之家”所取代：家庭的连结被新的社会结构稀释。即将拉开大幕的2018年春运、夫妻二人回谁家过年的争执等等，都是这种结构变化的体现。

一方面，新生代挑战自己、追求成功的决心愈发旺盛；另一方面，奋斗的压力让家乡的简单美好越发魂牵梦绕；困在中间难以解脱的感受，让《寻梦环游记》的观众对完美平衡的追求更加迫切 — 然而却急切难以实现。

观看一部简单的电影，每个人的泪点可能并非都如此复杂。但对于那些尚未对自己未来下定决心的观众而言，泪痕的余温将久久难以逝去。

But the on-and-off screen psychological connection may have extended further than simply shared values on family life. There is also a social dimension to the film’s popularity. 

The free movement of population brought about by the economic boom in China over the past four decades has profoundly changed the country’s social landscape. The traditional extended family typical of agrarian societies, as shown in the film, has gradually given way to the “nuclear family” comprising parents and children who live where they work that’s usually far from their birthplace, an idea the film repudiates at least a bit. 

Entering the 21st century, China’s economic expansion continues to encourage its people – for example the tens of millions migrant workers coming from rural areas into big cities – to chase after earthly success, but who run into issues such as inadequate social welfare protection due to uneven national development. Caught in between the absence of social protection on the one hand, the weakening ties with family on the other, people struggling on their way to personal success can feel a sense of nostalgia growing inside that Coco satisfies.    

At the end of the film, the protagonist Miguel ends his journey of weighing his music dream against the importance of family. But not everyone sitting in the cinema can see quick closure to their struggles of a similar nature. For them, it may take longer to dry up the tear tracks on their cheeks.

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