Coco

I'm going to volunteer a minority opinion. I've never loved The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is well-made, and nice to look at, but the characters are painfully underdeveloped (with the size of the cast that gets paraded on, it's too short to devote any amount of time to all of them that would have made a difference), and the songs are forgettable. I enjoy "What's This," but other than that, even 24 years and at least as many viewings later, I can't hum anything else from the film. I enjoy dark, Halloweeny, "land of the dead" type stuff, which is why I was all the more frustrated that it never came together into something great for me. It's a B- at best.

Coco is the movie I'd always wanted from Nightmare, but never got until now. It is beautiful across the board, and the best Disney/Pixar film I've seen since Inside Out. A triumph in so many aspects: visuals, music, and the celebration of diversity - with characters that live (even the ones who aren't living), breathe, are endearing, and accessible. Here we have a story that is just as lovely as the breathtakingly gorgeous land of the dead. It is not perfect; it dips its pinky toe into the pool of the Idiot Plot, when a twist is revealed, and for it to have worked, had to rely on the incredible coincidence of everybody failing to mention a certain character by name, so the protagonist and audience could be surprised by it in the final act. I'm not sure that was air-tight, and came off as contrived, but it is a mere quibble. In my mind, it amounts to one flower petal in the entire universe of the deceased. Coco deserves to be the next family classic, like Inside Out and Frozen. And the most important part? The sounds we hear from guitars actually match what the characters are doing with their fingers.