Encanto (2021)

Score: 3 / 5

Mirabel is the youngest daughter of the Madrigal family, who live in an isolated community in rural Latin America. I don't think the film itself identifies its location, but interviews with the filmmakers suggest its setting to be in Colombia. At least three generations of the family live together in a large house they affectionately call their casita. They work and live together in harmony, and appear to be the hotbed of culture in the village around them; everyone is welcome, and everyone is blessed by the love and fellowship the Madrigals cultivate. But Mirabel feels a bit out of place. She feels mounting pressure to contribute to the family work and to fit in; everyone else uses their unique talents and are loved for them, but Mirabel doesn't seem to have any special skill. 

Thankfully, the film -- which would otherwise be a fairly dull, melodramatic Bildungsroman -- imbues its story with magical realism, a genre most appropriate for Latin American artists. The unique talents of family members are in fact superhuman powers granted to the family after their abuela survived a tragedy. Abuela Alma's special candle provides each child, upon their coming of age, a magic gift as well as a magic bedroom in the casita, fashioned after their interests and talents. Mirabel's mother can heal ailments with her cooking; one sister has superhuman strength, and the other creates beautiful flowers in her wake on the merest of whims. Her abuela seems to compare her to each other family member and finds Mirabel wanting, her chilly disappointment slowly dissolving Mirabel's sense of belonging. When Mirabel notices growing cracks in the casita, she fears that the magic of her home will fade due to her own ineptitude, and she embarks on a journey of self-discovery to save the family magic.

Encanto is a beautiful exploration of a place and culture Disney hasn't really embraced before. My favorite element of the film was the animation of the characters, most of whom are in the same family and all of whom have differing skin tones and hair color and texture. These characters are fully dressed in traditional Colombian garments, with an abundance of colorful skirts, ponchos, and guayaberas. The casita, too, is a fun character in itself, seemingly alive and eagerly responsive to the needs and wishes of its inhabitants. Lin-Manuel Miranda lends his musical talents to this film through its original songs, and the music clearly uses traditional Latin American instruments and melodies to transport us aurally to Colombia.

Unfortunately, the songs here never quite manage to lift off; several of them feel like workshopped pieces scrapped from other projects that never got fully polished. The musical theatre-y numbers all sound derivative in style and substance (the introductory "Family Madrigal" is a verbose trainwreck poorly imitating the opening sequence of In the Heights), not helped by the singers themselves who sound much too like Miranda, whose singing voice has never been endearing to me. And while a couple of the songs (especially the two sung by Mirabel's sisters Isabela and Luisa) are fun, they are almost immediately forgettable, which is an utterly damning problem for a film that almost entirely exists to charm us with cultural delights. I mean, it's in the title!

Apart from the vague initial conflict -- a young Abuela Alma seems to be fleeing some kind of violent conflict before her husband is taken from her -- and the completely mysterious nature of the magic candle, there is no real mythology at work in this film. There is no real villain, either, other than the nameless, threatening doom slowly destroying the casita and causing mishap and mayhem for the family with magic powers. These facts result in a movie more meandering than intentional, and for most of its run time I found my mind wandering far from the spectacle on screen. Notably, while the story centers on Mirabel's discovery of a particularly dark family secret -- which is revealed in one of the more shockingly scary images in a Disney movie in my memory, which leads into a distinctly sad subplot about emotional sacrifices for family -- it is actually Abuela Alma who goes through a lovely dynamic character shift.

While I hope more Disney movies engage with this kind of emotionally honest storytelling, to say nothing of their recent run of movies that span the globe in terms of cultural showcases (a la Epcot), I found this movie shallow in its depiction of Latin cultures and deeply boring in terms of plot, pacing, and theme. Its characters -- brought to life by a brilliant cast of Latin actors -- are beautiful and charming and have lovely developmental arcs, but watching a young girl learn about her potential in relation to her magical family is hardly the stuff of Disney. I kept waiting for her to go on some kind of fabulous adventure (the directors previously worked on Bolt, Tangled, and Zootopia, among many others), but she almost never leaves the casita. I also waited for the film to lean into its potential for abstract visuals in the house (where is the arresting ingenuity of recent Pixar releases like Coco, Soul, or Onward?) but those are disappointingly tame here, despite still being beautiful to view. If nothing else, this movie adds to a growing roster of increasingly culturally aware features under the name of Disney, and it's a fun, safe way to enjoy family time at the movies during this holiday season.