How Are Normative Deaths Celebrated, Reinforced, or Disrupted in Children’s Media? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coco and Soul

Death has returned to the public sphere with the aid of popular media, especially in films. Often surrendering to storytelling and visual-graphics, fictional entertainment movies offer diverse representations of death as a contemporary biological-cultural-social-political assemblage. This proliferation and re-imagination of death is especially relevant in Disney-Pixar movies, which often depict death as spectacular and romantic, rather than realistic. This has prompted recent scholarly debate about Disney-Pixar productions’ developmental and educational value for young children, who are often considered caught between cinematic ‘simulacra’ and realities in which deaths are prevalent, but increasingly medicalised and private. Mostly employing thematic and content analytical tools to explore ‘what’ is presented in classical Disney-Pixar productions, existing work rarely situates these (re)presentations of death in emerging socio-historical realities. In this chapter, we adopt critical discourse analysis to interrogate how two recent Disney-Pixar movies themed around death—Coco (2017) and Soul (2020)—act to simplify and discipline death, reinforcing its normative and biomedical construction. Extending on the ‘new’ sociology of childhood, we problematise their re-imagination of death: one that reinforces children’s exclusion from death despite growing evidence of children’s capacity to understand complex phenomena.