This is… admittedly going to sound like a weird thing to ramble about, but it’s really, really important to me for reasons I will explain slightly later.
I appreciate a lot of things about Coco, from the way it portrays toxic friendships and how dangerous they can be, to the way it shows how devastating art theft is, to the way it makes a point to not invalidate Imelda’s feelings in spite of her being wrong about things. All of these things have been expounded upon by me and many others, but there’s one thing I haven’t really seen brought up much (aside from in contexts showing its connection with the guitar):
Héctor’s teeth.
Yes I know some of you are probably going “what the crap” but please hear me out.
Héctor’s teeth are kindof hard to ignore because one is bright gold, one is missing, and the rest are varying degrees of crooked.
When we first see the movie, though, this might not be something that stands out a lot because as far as we know, Héctor’s just a shady, comic-relief side character. It’s common for characters like this to have bad teeth. They’re often an indicator of a character who’s backwards, or not-serious, or who just does not care at all about hygiene and is probably gross. Sometimes it’s even indicative of villain characters! And, well, some of us thought that Héctor probably isn’t all that trustworthy at first, right?
Except Héctor is none of those things.
He’s the deuteragonist of the movie, he’s treated seriously, and he’s not evil. Yet he still has “bad” teeth.
Another very important thing to note is that in the epilogue of the movie, Héctor is all fixed up. His bones are less yellow, his markings are brighter, and his clothes have been cleaned and repaired. Sure, some bones are still cracked (we can assume they’re still healing), but more importantly…
His teeth are still imperfect! I mean… well, okay, teeth aren’t exactly easy things to fix, but false teeth can be acquired, and it’s entirely possible to get a white cap over a gold tooth.
Now, why am I taking the time to point this out?
Because all too commonly in fiction, if you see a character with “bad” teeth (be they yellow, chipped, missing, crooked, crowded, spaced too far apart, and so on), it’s usually an indication of a “bad” character. Be they stupid, gross, or, for some reason, evil, it’s likely they’ll have “ugly” teeth. But heroes almost always have perfectly straight, white, “beautiful” teeth.
And yet Pixar decided to give one of the most important characters in their movie imperfect teeth.
Again, you might ask, why is this important?
Let me tell you a story about a little girl. She had… a number of problems (with her eyes, with her skin, and other things), and one of those problems was her teeth. These teeth were amber-colored, crooked, and broke easily due to a condition she was born with. She didn’t neglect to brush her teeth or take care of herself. This was simply the way she was.
Try to convince other kids of that, though–kids who watch cartoons and movies and see heroes with perfect teeth (even in situations where it would make no sense for the character to have good dental hygiene), and see stupid characters and gross characters and villain characters with “ugly” teeth. Why would they want to play with a kid who was clearly like the stupid/gross/bad characters in the things they were familiar with? Surely this girl must have some or all of those qualities. Why should they be nice to her, or even say kind things to her?
“Your teeth are rotten.”
“Dirt mouth.”
“Shark jaws.”
Those aren’t things you easily forget.
I mean… I certainly haven’t.
Yeah, as you probably guessed, that girl was me. I was born with a dental condition that made my teeth as ugly as all the “ugly” characters you see in media. Fortunately, I was also born into a family who could afford to give me the dental care I needed to make my teeth look the way they “should.” Pallet expanders, braces, retainers, fillings, caps–those things aren’t cheap, but thanks to them I now have “normal” looking teeth.
But not everyone can afford those. I know there’s other folks out there who have maybe lost teeth, or can’t afford braces, or who were born with a condition like mine. Some people will always have “ugly” teeth.
Seeing a character like Héctor who is still good and handsome and has imperfect teeth means so, so much to me. Maybe if more characters like that were around when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have had to go through some of the bullying I did. There’s nothing to be done about that now, but maybe something can be done for people in the future. I really hope we see more characters like this, so that kids don’t grow up only associating imperfect teeth with bad people.
Until then…
Thank you, Pixar, for giving us this charming skeleton with a perfect smile.
As someone who also had holy-shit-what’s-wrong-with-your-mouth kind of teeth, I really appreciate this post. Never thought about it that way before!
Random Fandoms Archive 