Coco — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

Pixar's CalArts signature is stencilled on a door in the Land of the Dead's bureaucracy — the office of the Bureau of Family Grievances, where Héctor's paperwork problems live. It is a well-chosen home for the joke: a department that exists to adjudicate whether the dead are remembered, filed under a room number that only exists because a group of animation students remembered each other.

Tucked into the background of the Land of the Dead is an axe that Lee Unkrich has confirmed was modelled on the one Jack Torrance swings in The Shining — and beside it sits a red metal storage drum, which is to say a red drum, which is to say REDRUM. Unkrich has planted a Kubrick reference in every Pixar film he has directed since cutting the Overlook carpet into Sid's hallway on the original Toy Story, and this is the most elaborate of them: a visual pun that requires you to say the object's name out loud.

During a fast shot of Miguel running through the Land of the Dead in his skeleton makeup, a canvas in the background carries two blue silhouettes standing side by side — the Grady twins from the Overlook's hallway, rendered as a painting rather than a haunting. It is the second of the film's three Shining plants and the hardest to catch, because the camera never slows down for it.

The crowds are not generic skeletons. Frida Kahlo gets a full comic sequence as an avant-garde stage director, complete with her monkey alebrije and repeated unibrow gags — Héctor is at one point busted for falsifying a unibrow. Elsewhere in the film you can find the masked wrestler El Santo, the comedian Cantinflas, the actress María Félix, and singers Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete. Unkrich has said there are more hidden than the ones people have found.

The film's charming, murderous idol is assembled out of Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, the two great singing film stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema — the charro costume, the cinema-idol career, the tragic early death. The clever part is that both men also appear in the film as themselves, which quietly makes Ernesto a fiction standing among the real thing, and lets the movie critique celebrity worship without libelling anyone.

The luminous spirit creatures are drawn from a real folk-art form with a documented inventor: Pedro Linares, a Mexico City papier-mâché artist who in the 1930s fell seriously ill and hallucinated a landscape of impossible hybrid animals shouting a nonsense word — alebrijes. He built them when he recovered. Worth knowing that the film takes a liberty: alebrijes are not traditionally tied to Día de Muertos or to spirit guides at all. Coco borrows the form and gives it a new job.

Dante is a Xoloitzcuintli — the ancient Mexican hairless breed, which Frida greets in the film as the mighty Xolo dog. The casting is doctrine, not decoration: in Aztec belief the Xolo accompanied the dead across the water to Mictlan. So the film's clumsiest comic-relief character is, by tradition, exactly the creature that is supposed to be escorting Miguel, and the movie is telling you his function the first time it names his breed.

Pixar's most-travelled vehicle turns up early, driving past during Miguel's opening narration about the ancestor who banned music from the family. It is the standard placement — background, one pass, no comment — but getting it into a village scene set in a film with essentially no modern traffic takes more care than dropping it into a city.

Among the carved wooden creatures on an alebrije table Miguel runs past are three familiar shapes: Marlin, Dory and Destiny the whale shark, from Finding Nemo and Finding Dory. Rendering other Pixar characters as folk-art carvings rather than plastic toys is the smartest version of this gag the studio has done — the cameo is translated into the world's own visual language instead of being dropped into it.

Miguel and Héctor sprint past a poster for The Incredibles on their way to the Land of the Dead talent competition. Pixar's cross-film advertising usually happens in bedrooms and toy boxes; putting one of its own films on a poster wall inside the afterlife is a slightly stranger proposition, and the film simply does not stop to think about it.

The yellow ball with the blue stripe and red star from Luxo Jr. (1986) makes its obligatory appearance. It is the studio's most-planted object — it has now been found in Andy's hallway, Boo's bedroom, a girl's floor in Up and 22's quarters in Soul — and Coco keeps the streak intact without drawing any attention to it.