[Spoiler Alert! While I don’t go into deep detail for the movie Encanto, major plot points will be spoiled in this article.  There’s also a high risk that “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” will get stuck in your head again, and for that I don’t apologize.  It’s a bop.]

We’ve all heard the song by now.  Like the plague that was “Happy” by Pharrell Williams, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the latest ear worm from an animated movie to permeate basically every facet of life.  But there’s so much more to Encanto than this (admittedly) very catchy tune.  

I’m always skeptical when it comes to movies that get such unabashed praise.  Most of the time, I’m justified in this skepticism.  So much of my brain just responds with “Really?  It can’t be that good” and most of the time, I’m right.  Phantom Thread is all I need to say to that.  If I can ever force myself to sit through that movie again, I can tell you in detail why it was such a horrible love letter to domestic abuse, but let’s not go into that now.  When I was finally convinced to give Encanto a chance, I got about through the opening number before shutting it off. 

I should preface this by saying I’m not much of a musical fan.  I love Hamilton, yes, and even Moana too, to a lesser extent, but I think all that means is that I’m a fan of Lin-Manuel Miranda (who is also all over the writing and songwriting credits of Encanto and his enchanting, hip-hop-influenced songwriting style bleeds through just about every track).  I don’t know what it is about an opening number, but I shut off La La Land midway through its first song and I barely made it to the end of Encanto’s before I turned it off and started watching Better Call Saul from the beginning again.  I’m not anti-music, by any means; I love music and listen to just about every genre to some extent, but musicals just don’t work for me.  Maybe I live a less magical life than most, but even in a fantastic setting, watching people spontaneously break out into perfectly choreographed song and dance takes me out of the moment in a way that’s generally irreparable.  Once I’m pulled out of a film, once I’m watching it rather than being able to experience it and lose myself in it, the magic of film starts to slowly fade away.  I can put myself in a lot of shoes and relate to a lot of things.  But my imagination has a big empty space in it where others are singing their feelings at me.  

Most of the time, I find musicals a complete bore too.  Grinding the storytelling to a halt so a character can reiterate their innermost thoughts to me as expressed by melody and dance rather than action is the definition of telling over showing to me.  It sucks the momentum out of the film, it pulls me out of the movie, and I just generally don’t care for it.  Lin-Manuel’s songwriting is different, however—he often uses the songs as diegetic pieces that drive the story forward rather than just rehashing what I’ve just seen.  Even when the songs are personal revelations, they’re ones that we’re seeing for the first time, not simply punctuating what I should have learned through character interactions to begin with.  So I gave Encanto another chance at the recommendation of a surprising number of friends from all walks of life.  Recently I’ve been diving into kids’ movies; some I missed the first time around, some I just haven’t seen in a long time.  I don’t have children myself, but now that so many of my friends do, I find myself in the conversation a lot and thinking about what children’s entertainment can do, is supposed to do, and should do.  On any given day, you can find me ebulliently praising Hilda for its messaging and creative delivery of its message through story, and that’s definitely a kids’ show, despite the fact that it’s relevant to people of all ages and told in away that anyone can enjoy (I’ll stop here—this isn’t another post about how great Hilda is, but if you haven’t seen it, I beg you to go on Netflix and watch it).  I mean, I started this blog with the idea that entertainment is important because it helps shape our view of the world, and what could be more important than how the world is shaped in the eyes of the most naive and malleable, the eyes of the people who would be the next caretakers of the world we leave behind?  So I gave Encanto another chance.  And I’m so damn glad I did.  

The last time I watched a Disney animated musical, it was Moana.  And like I mentioned, I really liked that one.  There are some similarities, besides just super-composer Lin-Manuel, but the movies struck me so differently.  My goal here isn’t to compare and contrast the two, but since I also watched Moana recently, they’re both on my mind.  Moana’s journey was enormous—not just in scale, but the survival of so much was at stake.  Moana was the chosen one who basically saves the world.  What’s at stake in Encanto is very different.  It’s not about saving the world from destruction, it’s not even about saving lives.  It’s so much smaller in scale than a movie like Moana that it could seem insignificant through the wrong lens.  Mirabel’s a young woman who has nothing but her family at stake.  It’s as insignificant as it is relatable.  Call it magic if you will, but it’s truly pedestrian.  Normal.  Shoulder-shruggingly common.  

And yet, that’s why it’s so important.  That’s what makes Encanto such a special film.  That’s where the true magic lies.  This isn’t one young adventurer against the world—her sisters and cousins aren’t evil, they aren’t opposition, they don’t want to stop her.  Mostly, they’re all dealing with their own shit, as their songs tell us.  And the empathy with which these characters are handled is astonishing for a Disney movie, which so very often relies on flat characterizations of good and evil.  Luisa’s song, while not the catchiest or most pleasing to the ear, shows shocking maturity for a kids’ movie.  Luisa isn’t just the strong one afraid of becoming weak, she questions her own value as a person if she’s not useful—despite her physical strength, she’s crushed by the weight of expectation, of a world where productivity defines your worth.  Usefulness to others is the only metric by which Luisa feels measured and it’s utterly heartbreaking.  Isabela’s pressures are a little different.  There’s still that element of usefulness and expectation, but more than that, Isabela lives the life of the old school princess.  Normally Disney’s bread and butter, its meat and potatoes, its grilled octopus and olive oil, Isabela sings of her lack of agency and pressure to be perfect.  She has to be what others want her to be.  Another external locus.  Who can’t relate to that?  Another surprise.  Usually in a story like this, the pretty sister is an antagonist and her complaints frivolous, but Isabela is also approached with empathy and a level of maturity I didn’t expect.  There’s no evil stepsister here.  And let’s talk about Bruno.  Other than the grandfather’s ultimate sacrifice, no one makes a bigger one than Bruno.  He gives up his life and family because of how they treated his gift.  They took his visions as causal and turned him into a living ghost, haunting the literal spaces between walls in their magical home.  His whole story is just damn sad.  It makes for a catchy tune, though.

Enter the true villain.  No, not Abuela Madrigal.  A lack of generational compassion.  All too often, parents forget that their children are people too, with their own hopes and dreams for their own lives, with their own journeys to travel.  And this is the particular sin that Encanto tackles; as Abuela Alma berates Mirabel for ruining everything and harming the family, Mirabel replies with words that felt as if they’d come out of my own mouth before.  Even as an adult, they sound like words that come out of my mouth still.  Families are complicated, families can be harsh.  And here is where Encanto began to truly exceed my expectations.  As I’ve stated about Hilda many times, it’s an act of storytelling genius to impart a message to children that is also well taken by adults; but here, Encanto doesn’t bother to tell this to children.  Rather, this lesson is strictly for the adults watching.  Your kids aren’t extensions of you and they don’t exist to meet your expectations, nor fulfill your unfulfilled desires; they are people in their own right, with agency that shouldn’t be denied, with value that transcends any utility they can offer to other people, and that their wants don’t have to align with yours to be what’s right for them.  As the flashback rolls and we see how Abuelo Pedro paid for their gifts with his own sacrifice, it becomes clear—it’s not Isabela who needs to embrace Mirabel, it’s Alma.  The older generation has to embrace the younger, come as they as are.  And it’s up to the younger generation to forgive the older as they realize their mistake.  Not the hollow, guilt-driven forgiveness given to avoid self pity (see Lucille Bluth and her children’s weak protestations at the realization she’s been a bad mother), but real forgiveness that’s earned by coming to a mutual understanding and a change in behavior.  I’m not going to lie, this lesson hit hard.  I never thought I’d see a Disney musical where a character can flit about magically on conjured roses that depicts familial relations so brutally honestly.  I didn’t think such a realistic depiction of family was on the cards when I hit play.  I just assumed it’d be another cog in the Disney machine—a movie built to sell a soundtrack, a singalong disc, tickets to the ice show, tickets to the musical, lunchboxes (do kids still use lunchboxes? I didn’t even when I was a kid, I always bought the school lunch), and toys—and while it may actually be that, this isn’t just some fairy tale bogged down by endless songs like Frozen and Frozen 2 (which are fine, I like the first Frozen, it’s got some bops and a good story about being yourself).  Where other movies of this kind are simple and boil down to a fairly digestible statement, Encanto leans into the complicated nature of family.

That’s not to say that Encanto is a perfect film—there are so many characters that even now having seen it twice and going over my notes, I don’t see characters referred to by name, rather by description.  There’s Flower Girl (Isabela), Atlas Lass (Luisa), Dr. Doolittle (the kid who talks to animals), Silenzio Bruno, Wilmer Valderrama (Augustín), Sonic the Headscarf (Dolores), Storm (Pepa), and others.  It’s easy to get lost in just who is who because the names come at you so fast and often in song.  I also definitely got the feeling that Bruno was meant to be played by Lin-Manuel Miranda himself.  It’s not that Johnny Legs doesn’t do a fine job as Bruno, but I hear so much of Lin-Manuel’s Alexander Hamilton in his singing and dialogue that I can’t help but wonder.  He even kind of looks like Miranda during the Hamilton days.  And I know this is fairly nitpicky stuff, I know.  But I love that the Spanish language songs play without subtitles—I speak only a little Spanish, but the universality of music made it so I was able to understand what was conveyed without fully understanding what was being said.  I love the visuals and the animation style.  I love Lin-Manuel’s songwriting and just about every performance was able to keep up with his hip-hop-influenced music.  Sure, Luisa’s song may have had a whiff of the one time they let The Rock sing in Moana, but it’s delivered with such honesty that it doesn’t matter that Luisa’s not the most talented singer (she’s still far better a singer than I am, so who am I to judge?).  

Encanto is such a lovely film and such a wonderful film that when it ended, I wanted more of it.  And that’s just about the highest praise I can give a movie.  It’s one of those that when you turn it off, the world seems a little quieter than it was before you turned it on; as if it’s now devoid of a sound that should have been there the whole time.  I know it’s early to say and recency bias is a real thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, when the dust settles, Encanto starts to top the lists of the best Disney musicals of all time.  I’m racking my brain for one I think was better and I can’t come up with a name.  

And, as the family Madrigal (hopefully unrelated to the conglomerate from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul) rebuilds their literal foundation, I don’t need to tell you that it’s their metaphorical one that receives the true renovation.  Of course, in reality, families don’t always stick together and don’t always make it through the hardships and the differences.  Sometimes families break; sometimes differences can’t be overcome, sometimes blood is a curse and not a source of strength.  It’s not like Disney hasn’t gone with a darker ending before (queue up The Fox and the Hound if you doubt me), but in our current world, where we’re surrounded by so much darkness as is, I’m glad that they wrapped it up so neatly and positively, cloaking the audience in hope and warmth rather than slapping them with cruel reality.  Reality will be there when the credits finish rolling.