The Weekend Review: The Book of Life

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

As I have settled into a second job at AMC, I have unfortunately laxed in my CineMantic duties, an oversight that I hope to immediately correct.  Ironically, however, my newfound menial wage slavery is the exact reason why I was able to see this post's film in question, so it's not without at least some redeeming merit.

Framed by a museum tour guide telling a Día de los Muertos story to a group of disinterested, trouble-making students, The Book of Life follows the lives of three Mexican friends: the progressively minded María and the rivals for her heart - the heroic Juaqin and the romantic Monolo.  The two gods of the afterlife - paramores La Muerte, the affectionate ruler of The Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, the mean-spirited ruler of The Land of the Forgotten - make a wager about which boy will marry María.  If the Xibalba-backed Juaquin succeeds, he and La Muerte will trade realms with one another, but if the La Muerte-backed Monolo succeeds, Xibalba will forever cease to meddle in the affairs of mortals.  To ensure that his champion wins the contest for him, Xibalba gives Juaquin The Meddle of Everlasting Life, which bestows its bearer with immortality and invulnerability - an artifact that the murderous bandit king Chakal will stop at nothing to acquire for himself.

This is undoubtedly the most Mexican film I have ever seen.  And I don't mean that because the infinite magnificence of the universe looks like a sombrero, the Earth wears a magnificent moustache nor that Mexico is said to be the exact center of the universe.  When I say that it is the most Mexican film I have ever seen, it's because it earnestly, unironically and entirely embraces Mexican culture and society on every level of its production: from its almost exclusively Hispanic cast, to its true-to-form depiction of Día de los Muertos and surrounding beliefs and iconography, to its uniquely vibrant art style.  While it does poke some kid-friendly fun at the culture, it is neither derogatory nor stereotypical - going exactly as far as The Lego Movie's Brickberg went at poking fun of mainstream American culture.

Xibalba and La Muerte bet on the romantic destiny of Maria, Juaquin and Monolo.

Going into the film, I was under the impression that the animation style, in which all of the characters were rendered to look like highly detailed puppets, was a artistic gimmick: different for the sake of being different.  And although it undoubtedly goes a long way in making it a unique and memorable viewing experience, it actually serves a very real narrative function within the film.

Remember, although the story of Maria, Juaquin and Monolo is the central narrative focus, it is itself merely a story told within a larger frame story: a group of delinquent students touring a museum on Día de los Muertos.  The frame story is rendered in simple 3-D animation - visually identical to Tangled or Frozen.  Just before the narrative shifts to the tale of Xibalba and La Muerte's wager, however, one of the children uncovers a box of dolls that represent each of the internal narrative's characters: dolls whose design is identical to the character design of the majority of the film.  The animation style serves the exact same function as Christina Applegate's occasional voice over narration.  It is a physical reminder that the story we're investing ourselves in is just that - a story - being told to us from a vastly different setting by and to a vastly different set of characters.

Note how dramatically this scene looks from the one depicted above.

The animation is most breathtaking when the story shifts from the land of the living to the Land of the Remembered.  Sequences in this second setting (or third, counting the frame story) are magnificently rendered in low-key illumination.  Light seems to spill brilliantly from the building themselves, starkly set against the the the black-and-rose petal sky.  The combination of neon-colored illumination, sharp definition of the landscape and impossible set design force every building to pop against the background, seemingly in something altogether beyond 3-D rendering.

Undoubtedly, this is Guillermo del Toro's The Nightmare Before Christmas - a uniquely animated film that, although he did not actually direct it himself, has so obviously been guided by him as a producer that people will mistakenly attribute him as the director whenever the subject comes up in casual conversation.  Never mind how incredibly well-directed the film is in its own right, Del Toro's guiding hand completely steals the show.  Who's Henry Selick?  Exactly.  The same goes for Jorge Gutierrez.

If not for Justice League: War, this would be hands-down my favorite animated film of 2014, beating out even The Lego Movie's uncanny brilliance.  The animation is some of the most beautiful I have ever seen, the writing is intelligent and the production as a whole successfully toes the thin line between playfully self-aware and offensively derisive.  Although the message is hammered in more than just a little bluntly in its closing moments - even for a kid-centered film - the fact that it is a kid-centered film can mostly forgive that fact.  In what will undoubtedly be its final run before The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 pushes it out of theaters for good, I would strongly suggest that anybody who can so much as "merely stomach" animated films to see this before it leaves the big screen forever.  I give the film a high 8.5 out of 10 (nearly, but not quite, a 9).

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