'Coco' Trailer: Pixar Takes You On A Journey To The Afterlife

While many Pixar fans are planning to grit their teeth through the release of Cars 3 next week, we do have something to look forward to later in the year. Coco is the next original film from the most respected and critically lauded animation studio on the planet and, at the very least, it looks gorgeous. While the new trailer only shows off a sliver of story and character, the visuals on display are stunning to behold.

Set in the real world and the afterlife and starring a cast made up entirely of Latino actors, Coco follows a young boy who dreams of pursuing music, strums his hero's old guitar, and finds himself transported to the Land of the Dead, a sprawling metropolis that's home to everyone who has ever passed away and is filled with imagery borrowed from Mexico's Día de Muertos holiday. And as you'd expect from this combination of subject matter and storyteller, it all looks oh-so-very pretty.

Coco is the next film from director Lee Unkrich, a Pixar veteran who made entire audiences of grown adults and children alike weep with Toy Story 3. It remains to be seen if this will have a similar emotional impact, but I'm very interested to see how he handles a wholly original story and cast of characters.

Co-directed by Adrian Molina, Coco will open on November 22, 2017. Here's the official synopsis;

Coco follows the secret musical ambitions of Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village but comes from a family of shoemakers that may be the town's only music-hating household. For generations, the Riveras have banned music because they believe they've been cursed by it; as their family history goes, Miguel's great-grandfather abandoned his wife decades earlier to follow his own dreams of performing, leaving Imelda (Miguel's great-grandmother) to take control as the matriarch of the now-thriving Rivera line and declare music dead to the family forever.

But Miguel harbors a secret desire to seize his musical moment, inspired by his favorite singer of all time, the late Ernesto de la Cruz. It's only after Miguel discovers an amazing link between himself and De la Cruz that he takes action to emulate the famous singer and, in doing so, accidentally enters the Land of the Dead.

In the beautiful underworld, it's not long until Miguel encounters the souls of his own family — generations' worth of long-dead but no less vivacious Rivera ancestors, including great-grandmother Imelda. Still, given the opportunity to roam around the Land of the Dead, Miguel decides to track down De la Cruz himself. He teams up with another friendly (and skeletal) spirit — a trickster named Hector, — to find De la Cruz, earn his family's blessing to perform, and return to the Land of the Living before time runs out.