Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina researched the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema to ground Coco not in stereotype but in cultural precedent. Roberto Gavaldón's Macario — the first Mexican film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film — showed them how to treat the Day of the Dead with spiritual gravity, how to handle poverty and spirituality without sentimentality. Unkrich cited this explicitly in 2017 interviews. Macario is available on MUBI.
The Films That Shaped It