But Coco wasn't born with dementia. Judging from the animations at the beginning of the movie (and the novel), she was a normal young woman who didn't have any cognitive problems when she was young. And since Cruz died in 1942, it's logical to assume "Remember Me" was a huge hit during Coco's young womanhood - and since her father sang it to her all the time, there's no reason to think she DIDN'T immediately recognize it as the song her father sang to her all the time.
And at the end of the movie we're shown that whatever Hector wrote in his letters to Coco, it was enough to give him authorship of the song - "The letters Hector wrote home to his daughter contain the lyrics to all your favorite songs, not just 'Remember Me.'" It's unlikely that Coco kept her father's letters all those years and didn't read them, so she had to know the song wasn't traditional, and that her father wrote it rather than Cruz. Yet the movie acts like she never said anything about it, which is strange.
Put another way: suppose when you were a child, your father wrote a song called "Beat It". He sang it all the time, and since he travelled he wrote you letters containing the lyrics.
Some years later, you're listening to the radio and on comes Michael Jackson's new big smash hit, "Beat It." It's the exact same song your father sang to you as a child. What do you do?
A. Shrug it off as an astonishing coincidence, and watch Jackson become filthy rich and famous off the song
B. Decide that Jackson must have written the song, even though you remember your father singing the song when you were young and you have letters from twenty years ago with those same lyrics in them
C. Realize it's the same song but don't say anything because your mother doesn't like music, even though your family is poor and that song is making Jackson millions and millions of dollars and you have proof that your father wrote the song, and by the way you love your father and want to see his honor is restored
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sarahb2 (69)
7 years ago
Anyway, there's no way this makes sense in the movie. Logically, Coco would have immediately gone to whoever owned the rights to Cruz's music with her letters, showed them as proof Cruz stole her father's songs, and redeemed his honor. And made her family rich to boot. But of course, if she'd done that there would have been no movie, so the writers just ignore it.
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Otter (24464)
7 years ago
But if your father had been friends and business partners with Michael Jackson, you might think that your father had been singing songs written by his best pal and quoted lyrics written by him in his letters. I suppose you could have suspected that your father helped write some of these hit songs back in the day, but early childhood memories are notoriously unreliable and (I presume) nothing in your father's letters would provide legal proof of authorship. And who knows, maybe you contacted your father's old pal, and he said that yes he'd written that song long before you copyrighted it and your father always liked it.
And when you asked your mother if your father ever wrote songs she told you to shut up and make shoes or she'd give you a whallop...
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