Encanto: Dazzling Disney Feature Spotlights Home, Family, and the Joys of Being a Misfit

By Kim Hughes

Rating: A

Encanto explodes off the screen in a vibrant swirl of music, colour, and smiling faces with enormous eyes.

The 60th film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, featuring eight original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda — and made by two of the three filmmakers behind 2016’s Zootopia — is set in a small but gorgeous Colombian village pulsating with people, animals, and vegetation and helmed by the magical Madrigal family, a sprawling clan headed by its grandmother and including siblings, cousins, and spouses.

Its plot is possibly more complex than it needs to be for the small fry, and there is one scene that could be very scary. But for the most part, Encanto is a dazzling feast for big and little eyes and ears, and easily the most kinetic thing in memory.

Protagonist Mirabel is the only Madrigal offspring not granted a special gift-slash-superpower on her fifth birthday. Sisters Luisa and Isabela, for instance, can (respectively) lift enormous weight and spontaneously create flowers. Mother Julieta can heal wounds and disfigurements with the food she makes. One cousin can shapeshift, and another can talk to animals, and so on.

Smart, goofy, and loveable Mirabel bears her outsider status stoically but secretly longs to make her family proud. When a series of events threaten to extinguish the magic that has buoyed the Madrigals and the village they benevolently oversee, Mirabel is the chosen one to figure out what’s happening and fix it.

As might be expected, Encanto’s overt themes cover familiar ground aimed at younger viewers: the importance of family, of being true to oneself, of seeking light over darkness. But for adult viewers, there is much more here to unpack, including issues of enforced immigration, living with unrealistic expectations, the demands of multigenerational families, and the importance of social diversity.

So much about Encanto gets it right. For instance, the filmmakers paid particular attention to Colombian culture, assembling a group of experts to advise on the “anthropology, costume design, botany, music, language and architecture,” of the area to ensure authenticity at every step, “from the right way to grill corn to the smallest detail of everyday life.”

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It shows. Such minutiae results in a highly immersive experience. And while the film is in English, Spanish is sprinkled liberally throughout, furthering underpinning its Latin American feel. Miranda’s songs, too, are more than mere decoration, serving as boisterous melodic sidebars that reveal the inner thoughts and feelings of the character singing. There is also a brilliant array of white, brown, and black faces, creating a dynamic familial hodgepodge.

In that way in particular, Encanto is at its loveliest, reinforcing the profound sameness of its characters rather than their differences which are rightly portrayed as superficial.

Its voice acting cast is also highly persuasive. Did I tear up at the point where it seemed the Madrigal family might be coming unglued? You bet I did, just as I laughed at the bathing hijinks of a mischief of mice hoarded by a sad Madrigal relative living in self-imposed seclusion.

Encanto is just so lovely to look at that its story, while well-told, is almost secondary. You honestly just want to crawl inside the screen, wear Mirabel’s swooshing skirts, pet those donkeys, sniff those flowers, and chow down on that grilled corn. Wonder and imagination are in abundant supply.

Encanto. Directed by Byron Howard, Jared Bush, and Charise Castro Smith. Voiced by Stephanie Beatriz, María Cecilia Botero, Angie Cepeda, Wilmer Valderrama, Diane Guererro, Jessica Darrow and John Leguizamo. Music by Lin-Manuel Miranda. In theatres November 24.