Coco nearly Pixar's first full on musical

The animated smash hit is in contention for two Oscar awards. Photo / AP

Coco's twin Oscars chances this Sunday may include a nomination for its main song. But at one point, the animated smash was going to thrum from beginning to end with belt-'em-out tunes.

"Early on, our original intention was to have Coco be a full-on, break-out-into-song musical," Lee Unkrich, the film's Oscar-nominated director, tells The Washington Post ahead of this weekend's Academy Awards telecast.

For those fans keeping score, yes, Coco would have marked Pixar's first musical after nearly a quarter of a century of feature releases.

Pixar had hired the Oscar-winning songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (Frozen) to create music that would fill the world of the Rivera family in Mexico, as well as the movie's sweeping and brilliantly textured Land of the Dead.

"They wrote Remember Me, Unkrich says of the catchy Oscar-nominated tune, "but they wrote another six songs beyond that. It was for at least a year — maybe even a couple years — that our intent was to make Pixar's first musical."

Although those half-dozen tunes didn't make the film, you can hear several as bonus features on the DVD/Blu-Ray release of Coco that arrived this week. Hearing those artful songs might prompt the question: Why didn't they make the movie?

We just made the bold choice one day: okay, what if it's not a musical, but it still has a lot of performance in it?

Lee Unkrich

"I pivoted for a few reasons, the main one being that the film felt like it was trying to be something different than what we were trying to force it to be," says Unkrich, who worked on Coco for about six years after directing Toy Story 3.

"I realised that the film wanted to be music-filled and have a lot of music and performance in it, but the breaking out into song, to me, was feeling like a hat on a hat — it felt like an extra element," continues Unkrich.

"We just made the bold choice one day: okay, what if it's not a musical, but it still has a lot of performance in it? And that was the path we went down, and it felt like the right movie to be making."

(One obstacle was that the film was about a boy whose family didn't allow music — a significant challenge, Unkrich noted wryly, within a musical.)

He says he's not "a Broadway guy" but relishes the subversive tunes from shows such as Robert Lopez's Avenue Q" and The Book of Mormon. And after he worked with the Gipsy Kings on a Spanish-language number for Toy Story 3, he especially saw opportunity for a full Pixar musical.

"I imagine if Pixar was to make a musical, that it would be kind of out of the box in the way that (those two Broadway shows) are," Unkrich says.

"So I can still see us doing something some day. We just have to find the right project."