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Where Children Meet the Dead

Watch these together and Coco's candlelit sweetness darkens by degrees into a run of folk fables where the dead won't stay buried and children bargain with mortality under the shadow of war and fascism.

Anchored by two beloved crowd-pleasers (Coco, Pan's Labyrinth) and rounded out with festival-canon essentials and a couple of demanding cult objects, it's mostly approachable — but several entries, Grave of the Fireflies above all, are genuinely devastating, so save those for when you're ready.

• Macario (1960)
• Coco (2017)
• Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)
• Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
• The Boy and the Heron (2023)
• The Phantom Carriage (1921)
• The Devil's Backbone (2001)
• The Wolf House (2018)
• Volver (2006)
• Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
• La Chimera (2023) — The overlooked one that rhymes with Volver and Macario — Alice Rohrwacher's grave-robbing fable of a grief-struck dowser who literally divines the buried and can't stop reaching across the veil for his lost love; if the thread's traffic between the living and the dead moved you, this is the sun-faded Italian gem to finally pull down.
• Tótem (2023) — If Coco's family-and-mortality tenderness landed, this is the under-seen Mexican companion to finally watch — Lila Avilés's Tótem holds a whole day in one house as seven-year-old Sol drifts through the party thrown to say goodbye to her dying father, a child meeting death in candlelight without a single fantasy to soften it.