Horror Vacuii in Coco and Our Town

Coco is the latest example of the continuing descent of the animated film into meretriciousness and irrelevant and pointless diversity.  After Moana and the islands of the South Pacific (see my post of Dec,6, 2016) we are now in Mexico and The Day of the Dead, with the usual Pixar and Disney animation that packs every frame to the point of claustrophobia.  There is a story that makes no sense on any level and with the usual vapid songs, this time with a Latin flavor.  Hundreds of people worked on this film, seventy-six minutes long, with two directors --  Lee Unkrich and Adrian Malina -- though the film seems more arbitrarily assembled than directed by anyone with any kind of vision. Endless footage is wasted showing how the skeletons in afterlife can fall apart and reassemble themselves while it is never clear what may actually be going on, as a boy seeks out his dead father.

A more successful vision of horror vacuii is Our Town (1940).  Sam Wood's direction is wooden indeed and none of the characters come to life until the last "act," when they are dead, sort of.  Thorton Wilder's play was done on stage without any elaborate sets but the production designer William Cameron Menzies packs the frames of the shots in the film with complex and elaborate fences, trees and shadows and many of the shots are through the windows of the houses of neighbors Emily and George.  The play and the film are mostly sentimental claptrap, making it ideal for high school productions, but Menzies' design makes Grover's Corners come alive in the film.  It's hard to know at this point what Wilder was actually trying to say about small towns but what comes across to this viewer, who grew up in a small town, is that everybody knows everyone else's business and conformity rules, rather like the oppressiveness of Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), another critique of small town life that is often misunderstood.