Renée Victor, 'Coco' and 'Weeds' star, dies at 86
Renée Victor, 'Coco' and 'Weeds' star, dies at 86
Renee Victor, an actress known for her roles on the Showtime series "Weeds" and in the Pixar animated film "Coco," has died. She was 86.
A representative for Victor confirmed the actress' death to USA TODAY on June 1. She had been battling lymphoma, a type of cancer, according to Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter.
Victor provided the voice of Abuelita in the acclaimed 2017 animated movie "Coco." The Pixar film, which grossed more than $800 million worldwide, won two Oscars, for best animated film and best original song for "Remember Me."
A sequel to "Coco" was announced in March, and Victor had indicated she planned to reprise her role.
"It was my great pleasure and experience working with the incredibly talented (directors) Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina!" she wrote on Instagram in March. "We get to do it again! This is what we've all been waiting for! I'm so excited!"
'Coco 2' is in the works at Pixar: What we know
She added, "Coco shared a Mexican tradition that is now celebrated around the world in unity. An amazing amount of work and talent goes into the creation of this unique film."
Watch the opening number of 'Coco' you didn't see
Victor also played housekeeper Lupita on Showtime's "Weeds," which ran from 2005 to 2012. According to IMDb, she appeared in 22 episodes across the show's eight seasons.
Her other television work included appearances on "Dead to Me," "Snowpiercer," "Vida" and "ER," and on the film side, she also starred in "Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic." Outside of acting, Victor was a singer and performed with her husband as the duo Ray and Renee.
In a statement shared on Instagram, Pixar paid tribute to Victor with a reference to "Remember Me," the Oscar-winning song from "Coco."
"We are heartbroken to hear of the passing of Renée Victor, the voice Abuelita in 'Coco' and an incredible part of the Pixar family," the company said. "We will always remember you."
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Watching Elio, the title character of Pixar's latest film, it's difficult not to draw comparisons to another child hero underneath the Disney umbrella. Introduced as a shy child reeling from an unspecified accident that took his parents' life, the 11-year-old bursts out of his shell upon an encounter with an installation speculating of life beyond the stars and emerges as a hyperactive, alien-obsessed weirdo who runs around wearing a cape and metal colander helmet, speaks in a made-up language he calls 'Elio-ese,' and drives his Air Force aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) crazy. From the tragic backstory to the misfit behavior to the tense relationship with his guardian, Elio might as well be the male version of Lilo from Disney's similarly sci-fi themed 'Lilo & Stitch' — it doesn't help that plenty of people went to go see the remake just last month. More from IndieWire Danny Boyle Says He Couldn't Make 'Slumdog Millionaire' Today, and He'd Want 'a Young Indian Filmmaker' Instead David S. 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Any Pixar film that's been released since roughly the mid-2010s invites a perhaps unfair game of comparison, measuring how it stacks up to the studio's golden period of the 2000s, when every other film they produced was an instant classic. 'Elio' certainly is a fair sight better than much of the company's latest output, which has geared more toward regurgitating old ideas or sputtering around in shallow storylines. And yet watching it feels a slight bit depressing at the same time, a reminder that where Pixar's films once led the animation industry, taking out there concepts like rats that want to cook and robots that want to find love and bringing exquisite heart to them, they now feel imitative instead of innovative. If there were ever a version of 'Elio' that had the spark of an old Pixar classic, it got shuffled out of existence by a turbulent production process that saw original director Adrian Molina, who previously helmed the company's Oscar-winner 'Coco,' replaced by the duo of Domee Shi — whose hilarious 'Turning Red' remains the best Pixar film of the 2020s by a significant margin — and Madeline Sharafian, known for directing the short 'Burrow.' Molina based the film's original story concept heavily on his own life, and the directorial transition occurred right around Pixar head Pete Docter admitting the studio would be pivoting away from 'personal stories' driven by directors to films with universal mass appeal. Certain elements of the script directly based on Molina's life, such as Elio's mother working for the military, got rewritten entirely. The directorial change-up feels readily apparent throughout 'Elio's' 90-minute running time. That's not necessarily due to plot holes or pacing — the film clips along its standard beats at a steady pace, only lagging during one spaceship ride near the end that comes across as pure filler — but the overall feeling that it's only dipping its toes into the emotional and creative depths of this story. Elio's desire to be abducted by aliens, a reaction to his miserable loneliness on Earth, leads him to send a message via a satellite at his aunt's base to the stars pleading for extraterrestrials to come abduct him. The message gets received not just by a spacecraft but by the Communiverse, a roaming planet-like spaceship holding an international committee of representatives from across several galaxies. Getting whisked away into this fantastically technicolor world is a dream come true for Elio, enough that he's willing to go along with it when the committee reveals their misread that he's the leader of Earth. To secure his place in their ranks, he bravely/insanely plunges himself into solving a diplomatic crisis between the alliance and Lord Grigon (a suitably hammy Brad Garrett), the 'blood emperor' of a warlike race of alien worms from the planet Hylurg, who seeks revenge on the ambassadors for rejecting his bid to join them. All of this looks fantastic — while on Earth, Elio suffers a bit from that squishy, rounded animation style that's recently become more or less Pixar's house look. In space, the movie experiments more, adding splashes of 2D graphic animation and gorgeous technicolor around the stately white spaces Elio inhabits. The alien designs are suitably weird and inspired, from the mind-reading floating flatworm Questa (Jameela Jamil) to the rock monster Tegmen (Matthias Schweighöfer). 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Grigon is amusing as a warlord who, at heart, is really a beleaguered dad — he reminds one of Bowser in the Mario games more than any past Pixar character — but his softness is telegraphed a bit too early for him to ever be a convincing threat, even to children. This wondrous world up in the stars too frequently feels more like an amusement park for Elio to run and geek around in than a living, breathing universe. The real problem, though, might be the material that's earth-bound. 'Elio' draws clear parallels between Grigun's issues relating to Gideon and Elio's disconnect from his aunt Olga, and his desire for alien approval comes from a deeply wounded sense of pain that he no longer belongs on Earth after the passing of his parents. There's some great raw material here, and yet onscreen it never gets to compelling territory. Elio and Olga are simply too generic, stock types that can be found in plenty of modern animated films, for their friction to ever build into something as compelling as, say, Marlin and Nemo's strained father-son relationship. It doesn't help that Saldaña, whose character is meant to be the story's heart, sounds like she's phoning it in a bit in the voiceover booth. There's no specificity to Elio's circumstances on Earth — his trauma from his parents' deaths gets mostly brushed over, the isolation he feels from his peers is represented via a stock bully, even the town he lives in is a generic suburbia — which makes his yearning to escape to the stars ring hollow. So, by the time Rob Simonsen's rather generic score begins to overdo the bombast and the film gears up for an emotional decision from Elio about where he belongs that it has to take more than a few logical leaps to arrive at, the pathos falls a tiny bit flat. It's difficult not to wonder what 'Elio' could have been like, had the original concept from Molina made it onscreen, and whether or not the more 'personal' version of this story had the sharp edges and specificity needed to elevate the film from a cute kids' film to something more meaningful. 'Elio' isn't a bad time at the theaters — it's pretty to look at, charming enough, and frequently funny. But by shying away from investing in where its main character is coming from, the movie makes his galactic adventures feel a bit weightless. Disney will release 'Elio' in theaters on Friday, June 20. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. 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