Coco is a film about being remembered. Not about death, though death is everywhere in it; about what happens after death when the living decide to forget. That is its central terror and its central argument, delivered inside a film of such visual magnificence and emotional generosity that you forget how cleverly structured it is until it breaks you in the final act.

Miguel Rivera wants to be a musician. His family has banned music for generations. On Dia de los Muertos, Miguel accidentally crosses into the Land of the Dead, where the spirits of the departed live on the memory of the living. He has until sunrise to return.

The final sequence, involving a song called “Remember Me” performed for a grandmother who no longer knows the singer, is among the most emotionally devastating things Pixar has ever put on screen. It works because the film has earned it, building every relationship with patience and love.

Coco won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. Both were inevitable.