Coco: Worldbuilding without Info Dumping

Imagine you have a beautiful setting for your characters. You have the language, the culture, and even the currency all figured out for your brand new world. On the other hand, you have your story. Your characters are all fleshed out and you know exactly how the plot is going to play out. The only problem? 

How can you make these two things work together? 

A lot of writers turn to info dumping, and almost any reader out there could point to a book they’ve read that has too much of it. Whether it’s a character using exposition to explain something or a narrator that rambles on for three whole pages, it is always evident when a writer is trying to shove some explanation into their story. 

How can we avoid exposition like this? How can writers showcase their beautiful world without making the readers feel bored? How can we excel at seamless worldbuilding?

Pixar’s animated Coco just so happens to have the answer.

Coco

Years ago, a man left his wife and daughter behind in order to pursue a career as a performer, leaving his wife and daughter with nothing but a shoe business and a hatred for music. But many generations later, a young boy named Miguel secretly dares to defy his family’s traditions by teaching himself how to play the guitar. Determined to make a living off of it, he seizes the opportunity to perform in the village plaza on the Day of the Dead. But his grandmother discovers his plan and smashes his guitar before he can succeed.

Miguel, furious and brokenhearted, flees his family and decides to steal a guitar to perform at the festival. But since The Day of the Dead is a time for giving and not taking, Miguel is put under a curse that transports him to the Land of the Dead, where all of his ancestors come alive as walking, talking skeletons. Now, with the help of his new friend Hector, he must go in search of a family member who can send him back to the Land of the Living.

How To Integrate Worldbuilding

This new world Miguel stumbles upon is full of complex, moving parts. Everything from the class system to the animals is completely new. Yet, the world’s explanation never feels contrived or forced. Any background information that we need to know is so smoothly incorporated into the plot that the viewer is never taken out of the story. There are many ways to make this work in your novel, but there is one technique Coco used that really stands out. 

Near the middle of this movie, Miguel and Hector briefly visit a skeleton named Chicharrón  in order to obtain a guitar that will help Miguel along his journey. Although this character only appears in one scene that functions to move the plot along, he perfectly showcases the darker parts of the Land of the Dead. After Hector greets his old companion, Chicharrón rolls over in his hammock and fades away into oblivion. Miguel is shocked and confused until Hector explains that, since no one is left in the Land of the Living to remember the poor old man anymore, he passes away a second time. He becomes forgotten. 

This not only shows you more about how this world works, but also raises the stakes of the whole movie. If any of Miguel’s relatives back home permanently forget about him or Hector, they could disappear forever. And the audience was able to learn this all because of that short, simple scene with Chicharrón. 

When trying to write worldbuilding into your story, use characters to explain things to the audience. And that doesn’t always mean your character will give a verbal explanation, although sometimes that will happen. Instead, show how your new world interacts and affects the people living in it. Let the new set of rules speak for themselves. In Coco the concept of being forgotten is introduced, not by a narrator or a piece of dialogue, but by having the audience actually watch someone fade away. Using characters to expand your world has a much greater impact because the audience is able to see this new universe with their own eyes. 

Obviously, this technique can’t be used too often, otherwise you’ll end up working with an insanely large cast of characters. However, if utilized sparingly, adding side-characters can be one of the best ways to show off your world. Not to mention, you can always condense multiple ideas into one character if you need to. For example, although Chicharrón is mainly there to expand the world, he also provides a guitar for Miguel and reveals a different side of Hector’s personality that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Your character doesn’t just have to fulfill one purpose and then disappear forever. Secondary characters can fill multiple functions in your story and expand the world in all sorts of ways. 

Also, notice how in this film, certain information isn’t shared with the audience until it’s relevant to the characters. “Being forgotten” was only explained once it was important to the story. This means that you don’t have to cram a bunch of background information into the first few chapters of your story either. Spread them out and place them strategically throughout your world so that what they reveal hits hard for both your protagonist and your readers.

When trying to seamlessly include your setting with the rest of your story, show those elements of your world through introducing new characters. They don’t have to be fully fleshed out, they don’t even always need a name, just introduce the new rules of your world by showing how they affect the people who live in it. That impact will leave your readers with a full grasp of just how powerful your worldbuilding is, and it’ll all happen without a word of info dumping.

Let us know:

What other stories did you notice use this technique for worldbuilding?