In ‘Coco,’ Bringing the Land of the Dead Back to Life (Published 2017) (2024)

With the new “Coco,” Pixar Animation Studios aims to bring the dead to vivid, reverent life. The movie is set against the backdrop of Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), the Mexican holiday when families gather to honor ancestors by building altars to them and decorating their grave sites.

The film (due Nov. 22) centers on a young boy, Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), an aspiring musician whose adventures take him to the land of the dead, a towering metropolis that is home to departed loved ones. In their research, Pixar filmmakers made trips to Mexico and embedded with families to observe the ways they paid tribute to their forebears. Hallmarks of their traditions (like paths of flowers and the warm glow of candlelight) are woven into the movie’s visual language. Here, the director Lee Unkrich (“Toy Story 3”) and the production designer Harley Jessup explain how, using three of the film’s set pieces.

Entering the Land of the Dead

Miguel walks along a glowing bed of flowers that takes him into the land of the dead. In their visits to Mexico on Día de los Muertos, the filmmakers would see trails of marigold petals leading from cemeteries to houses — a symbolic path to help guide ancestors home. “Our story department took that idea and literally connected the two worlds with the marigold bridge, which we tried to make as spectacular as we could,” Mr. Jessup said.

The look of the land itself was inspired by the city of Guanajuato, a former silver-mining town on a hillside peppered with brightly colored buildings that make for a vertical architectural display.

Celebrating Life With Lights

In an early sequence set in Miguel’s Mexican town, the fictional Santa Cecilia, he walks through a cemetery. Its design is an amalgam of graveyards the filmmakers visited in the states of Oaxaca and Michoacán. “When you walk into these cemeteries, they’re just gorgeous,” Mr. Unkrich said. “It’s like an endless sea of candles, and the marigold flowers are everywhere. So it creates this beautiful golden glow.” As families tended the graves of their loved ones, some would play music quietly and others would spend the night at their plots. The filmmakers wanted to capture this on a scale that’s both grand and intimate at once.

In the cemetery, Miguel visits the tomb of his inspiration, the superstar musician Ernesto de la Cruz. Dwarfing the gravestones, Ernesto’s bold mausoleum was modeled on the monuments built to remember Mexican showbiz icons like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete.

Marigold Grand Central

This is the transportation hub for dead family members (who are depicted as enhanced skeletons) traveling to the land of the living. Miguel goes there on his journey, and has to pass back through it to get to the land of the living. The animators looked to the actual transit system and buildings of Mexico City. The trolleys, for example, are meant to be recycled cars once used in that city. The iron railings and supports of the 1907 Palacio de Correos, in Mexico City’s historic center, also inspired the animators. Additionally, they studied the nearby Gran Hotel, which has a colorful stained-glass ceiling. “What we also liked is that it is literally skeletal,” Mr. Jessup said about the building, “so we could work a lot of skeleton motifs into the bases of the pillars and the stained glass.”