Fifteen years before Pixar released the feature length Coco (2017), a short film simply titled Dia de los Muertos (2002) made the international film festival circuit. Conceived, produced, and directed by Kirk L. Kelley, the six-minute video project took a couple of years to make, during downtime moments from commercial projects, by the team of animation and stop-motion artists at (then) Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon (now split into two separate operations, HouseSpecial and LAIKA Studios).
Kelley, who today is a Creative Director at HouseSpecial, with his deep interest in other cultures, spent the latter years of the 1990s visiting Days of the Dead festivities in Oaxaca and in highland villages in Guatamala taking in the sights, sounds, smells, and sacred beauty associated with local celebrations that honored deceased relatives. In Dia de los Muertos Kelley sought to combine stop-motion video with CGI to represent the rich complexity of this cultural manifestation. Stop-motion was used to represent the living world while CGI was used to represent the spiritual world. Set in a cemetery during el Dia de los Muertos, he created a richly layered world that captures the beauty, mystery and sacredness of the ancient Mesoamerican holy day through the use of dynamic camera angles and lively music.
Mesoamerican cultures, not unlike many ancient cultures around the world, celebrated autumnal holy days of feasting and dancing with bonfires and revelry in honor of the dead, on occasions digging up bones of their deceased family members, typically buried under their homes, to have in attendance at meals. When the Spanish conquistadores arrived the Catholic priests put a stop to the disinterment of deceased relatives during this celebration, and standardized the dates of the celebrations, having previously done that with European pagan day of the dead celebrations. These celebrations now fall on the calendar as follows: All Hallows’ Eve (October 31st), All Saints’ Day (November 1st), and All Souls’ Day – el Dia de los Muertos (November 2nd).
