Arjun Khemani

‘Vivo’, the Sony Pictures Animation musical is rooted upon a kinkajou, deeply passionate about music, who sets about on a journey of a lifetime to fulfil a dream of an old friend by delivering a love song.

The “original songs” were written by Lin-Manuel Miranda who even voices the kinkajou (main title and character—Vivo) in the film. The songs in the wonderful musical express the brilliant creator at his best. And they make you want to jump up and sing together

The 10 years which the movie took in the making was certainly worth it (from the musical perspective).

This article is turning out to be a monotonous “movie review” but that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The real deal of this article is Lin-Manuel Miranda and his “original songs”.
“Why is that such a big deal?” Good question. Let me answer it through the remaining segment of this article.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is the famous producer behind the Broadway Musical “Hamilton”. I haven’t gotten the chance to watch it live, yet, but I did watch it repeatedly a few times on Disney +. And watching it exceedingly influenced and inspired my life tremendously, in an amazing way. In fact, it was one of the few major inspirations that led me into the path of writing and then indirectly starting this blog! The “I wrote my way out” part really struck me and so “I picked up a pen and I wrote my way out!”. Anyway, “Hamilton” the musical inspired me to write and “Vivo” the animated musical, now did it again, inspiring me to learn music.

‘Vivo’ The musical was filled with incredible music through all it’s phases. And the movie consisted of small, but acute visual inspirations of music in some of the backgrounds. The electrical lines were designed to look like sheet music and a rooftop has hints of musical notes throughout one scene. Consequently, even to a non-musician (like me) the scene was set for an animated musical to be a musical about a musical, if that makes any significance. So there just was a lot of music! And it stimulated a desire to learn music, and so I started learning! I’m doing a course on the “Fundamentals of Music Theory” and it’s been going great so far.

Inspiration can stem off anything. Yes, even a Netflix binge. One only needs to act on that inspiration when it finds him.

I highly recommend watching ‘Vivo” for everyone, and you certainly don’t need to get inspired about music from it but it’s just an amazing musical so I endorse watching it.

You can watch the movie on Netflix here.