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Is Coco Appropriate for Christians?

Name: GodlyScore Review: Is Coco Appropriate for Christians?
Item: Coco (Pixar)
Rating: 3.3
Author: GodlyScore

Coco (Pixar, 2017) is the Academy Award-winning animated film about 12-year-old Miguel in Mexico, who crosses into the Land of the Dead on Día de los Muertos. It is one of Pixar's most beautiful and moving films — and it raises genuine questions for Christian parents about its portrayal of death and the afterlife.

GODLY

Coco (Pixar)

Mixed

★★★☆☆3.3/5 · GodlyScore 65/100

Extraordinarily beautiful film with powerful themes of memory, family, and love transcending death — but its Land of the Dead framework and ancestor worship draw from Mexican folk religion rather than Christian theology.

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What Makes Coco Exceptional

Coco is one of Pixar's most moving films — its final act, in which Miguel sings "Remember Me" to his dying great-great-grandmother, is one of the most genuinely emotional moments in animated film history. The film's central thesis — that the dead truly die only when the living forget them, and that love preserves memory — is deeply human and resonant.

The film celebrates family, loyalty, forgiveness, and the reconciliation of broken relationships. The villain's crime (stealing credit for songs, killing the original artist) is portrayed as genuinely evil. The resolution involves a family reconciling across generations. These themes are compatible with Christian family values.

The Theological Questions

Coco's afterlife is drawn from the Mexican Catholic/folk synthesis of Día de los Muertos — the Land of the Dead is a cheerful, colorful place where deceased family members live active lives until the living forget them. This differs from biblical eschatology in significant ways: the dead do not continue in a parallel colorful dimension, ancestors cannot be communicated with, and the mechanism of "forgetting causing final death" is not biblical.

Hebrews 9:27's "people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment" describes a different afterlife mechanism than Coco's. This is not demonic — it is cultural folk religion — but it does present a vision of death that differs from what the Bible teaches.

Christian parents can use Coco as a springboard for conversation about what the Bible actually says about death, resurrection, and eternal life — which is a richer and more hopeful story than Coco's folk religion framework.

What to Look for in Children's Media

Children's media shapes formation in ways adult media does not — children are not yet equipped with the critical distance to evaluate what they're consuming. The question is not just "is this harmful?" but "what is this teaching?" GodlyScore evaluates children's content with heightened sensitivity to family depiction, LGBT normalization, spiritual content, and whether the overall tone encourages virtue or passivity. Score: see full guide.

Age Recommendations

See our Christian TV Reviews hub for similar content evaluated with the same framework. Common Sense Media provides detailed age-by-age content guidance.