Why Everyone's Talking about Encanto

i had next to no idea what kanto was gonna be like for as excited as i was and how hard i am on movie trailers that give away too much plot disney doesn't always have a great track record when it comes to trailers that don't give enough but thankfully the story of the magical family in the magical house but with the one non-magical member was a charming and joyous musical rump that just so happens to be a smaller scale family drama with attentive mystery it was already getting pretty positive buzz from the start but since its home release has exploded in popularity in ways that many recent disney movies haven't some of this is for practical reasons like go figure a story about generational tension unappreciation and stress hitting the population's emotions at this point in history the fact that the movie is colorfully and incomprehensibly beautiful and that lin-manuel miranda's colombian-flavored musical numbers are absolute bops that have ear wormed their way into people's souls i'm partial to luisa's surface pressure for its relatable subject matter and it's absolutely singable hook but unsurprisingly the closest to a villain song we don't talk about alberto's dad has become disney's biggest billboard hit since let it go and if dems the rules i guess this means that every movie in the future is going to force in a bruno reference of which luca apparently got a head start but can we also agree that like half of the appeal of the song is just dolores 22nd flow and how that's a decent contender for best 20 seconds out of the entire movie but that just accounts for its massive spotify numbers the encompassing factor for its success is simplistically what this movie does differently from other disney or standard animated films which again some of which is obvious from just the concept of a colombian magical realism family drama mystery but with an emotional emphasis on how poor communication and hiding your pain in an effort to look strong can eat away at the unity of a group of people even if they love each other very much or feelings of shame and pressure at measuring up to expectations and even when you meet those expectations the pressure to keep it up indefinitely as such many people have found its characters and themes to be incredibly relatable and some of it is the small details like the seven different ways they utilize the motif of the butterfly in visuals and in theme mirabelle's insane enviable embroidery the fact that camilo's transformations are pretty much just jump cuts with follow through and amongst all of the great representation this is providing i personally appreciate female characters with thicker builds and noticeably lower vocal registers and we do see some growth where disney is still lampshading some of its old cliches but not quite as bluntly as in the recent past both from the alan tudyk toucan i went to julia and bruno's rats are subtler riffs on the disney animal sidekick trope this also highlights another welcome deviation within the concept of superheroes or at least super powers in a refreshing scenario where no one is hiding their identity and their job is to help the community not to fight villains how would that affect their upbringing their personalities and what mental stressors would accompany them one of the things i picked up on right away was how much it must suck to be tia pepe because if she just is in a bad mood creates a tornado she could literally kill someone this is someone who has been pressured consistently since she got her power to always be happy there's also her mother and how she's likely pressured to constantly be cooking because what if somebody gets into an accident and they're near death and how has dolores not gone insane with all of the sounds being able to hear literally everything in what has to be like a mile to five mile radius and if you consider that the first incarnation of camilo was that he was an emo boy that this jokester persona is an act after likely being encouraged by abuela to boost morale so basically what we have is a whole family where everyone's joy emotion is a dictator and is also a sign for why abuela's treatment of mirabelle is so baffling because camilo's job is to do basic chores she can do chores actually there is one movie that encanto reminded me of that actually made me very happy maybe you should leave the decorations to someone else could you not be in mission control at all another story with no real villain but the plot is at least instigated by inter-family tension and poor communication and everything is propelled forward by a well-meaning perpetually positive and passionate pedestrian protagonist that feels left out of their extraordinary family but here part of the tragedy isn't just that mirabelle feels left out as established nearly everyone has their own burdens or stressors that contribute to the strain between the family members but all of them are keeping it secret or at least under control except for mirabelle whose flaw or failure was done right in front of everyone and became the first sign or signal that the power of the family is limited or waning so mirabelle in some members eyes becomes associated with the family's weakness which means as more and more problems pile up they become easier to pin them on mirabelle anyway point is encanto's great but it does make you wonder with all that praise if we're on the precipice of a backlash now if you're just talking about not talking about bruno even with its superior numbers it's unlikely that it will at least get the same level of backlash as let it go did if only because it's an ensemble song which means it's not going to be as covered by every single person and their five-year-old this also seems to be more popular with adults than kids and that's when the overplay really goes into overdrive but the film from the start it was doing well critically but there were some actual critiques which is fine because no movie is perfect now some of these critiques i think was just a matter of people's expectations being thrown off balance exacerbated by the trailer emphasizing some of the more exciting of the non-diegetic imagery which unfortunately is more of a product of our very action-oriented marketing mentality that takes ghibli movies and makes trailers that focus on the five minutes of fantastical action but as said encounter is a family drama not your typical animated adventure it's not a journey or a quest between an unlikely duo the story is mostly confined within the enchanted house or at least the village predominantly by one character having small moments with a larger core cast this inherently will give the movie a different structure sense of pacing and flow of tension because unlike seeing the relationship between two unlikely characters grow these one-off moments of mirabelle and ex-family member are isolated almost interchangeable as if they could be presented in any order but this is one of the things that i think is only off-putting on a first viewing because it's so unusual and isn't really noticeable afterwards and otherwise it makes the movie feel much more unexpected and surprising by deviating from the formula as in the end it still holds together by retaining the continuity of learned information but the other by-product people just wanting to see more of the family and i totally get why nearly every member could be the star of their own film especially when the story's entire concept is how each one of them has their own hidden burdens and struggles and maybe it's our superpower saturated zeitgeist that makes us gravitate toward characters with powers ironically creating the exact scenario talentless miracle with a bee is enduring in this film being undervalued in favor of the extraordinary i certainly understand people would have wanted to see some more evidence of any of these characters growing or having arcs like isabella even if the time just wouldn't have allowed for that but part of the idea is that everyone was so distracted and focused on their own stuff and unwilling to communicate particularly antonio gets brought up a lot because he has a close bond with mirabelle and he's well established at the start and normal movie language dictates that an established character up front means that you play a bigger role later now at first i wondered if that was part of mirabelle's tragic situation that antonio depended on her when he didn't have a gift but then once he had a gift he didn't need her anymore now that he was accepted but even given its small character moments format antonio's brief reappearance actually speaks volumes because for the entire time that dolores knew that bruno was still in the house she didn't tell anyone either because she believed it was better for bruno or better for the family or just wasn't comfortable getting involved either way it's a result of the family's strained relations under abuela's pressure but antonio who had been emotionally supported by mirabelle the minute he hears about the situation goes to help plus if antonio had hung around for too long when his character didn't really have anything to do i guarantee he would have outstayed his welcome and become annoying after a while and that goes for all of the family members they have become so popular and are considered so interesting because they're underplayed so there's all this fun potential speculation around what are both still pretty well established characters for the amount of limited screen time they have but ultimately still pretty blank slates and that tends to be a common ingredient in a lot of franchise's favorite characters and this encapsulates other similar critiques how a lot of questions and clarifications are still left unanswered by the end it's not made perfectly clear how the magic works or even why mirabelle didn't get a gift but that's often the nature of stories of magical realism a lot of them are meant to be interpretable and metaphorical and or makes for prime theory fodder which is propelling a lot of the current conversation around the movie the popular theories propose that mirabelle is meant to be the new matriarch like abuela who also doesn't have a power and if the rooms are theoretically spaces to hone their magic that mirabelle's room is the whole house since her gift involves supporting other people basically that the family is the talent and maribel is the manager or as howard hope put it the conductor of a magical family but theoretically if mirabelle did technically have a gift that it would probably be the ability to perceive others emotions by the way of the non-diegetic visuals of the film that of course now would be diegetic i also wondered whether or not mirabelle had maybe a closer bond with the house than the others did but that's hard to claim because of the screen time we don't see the house interact much with everyone else but the other family members have powers that they probably rely on more but that's only if everything the magic has done has been deliberate and personally infallible divine entities are no fun and what did the magic i was about to write see the future and duh still i prefer the symbolic representation of how friction in the family unit drips down and affects children's development mirabelle's situation could be representative of a number of experiences that boil down to feeling unexceptional unfulfilled unrecognized or out of place with the ones around them this also brings up images of children who have felt the need to earn their parents love through accomplishments including the garden-variety coming-of-age late bloomer because children are expected to hit certain milestones at the time when it is most convenient for the adults and if they don't then they are deemed failures in big houses young children are raised in the nursery until they come of age and get their own room which in encanto is the ceremony where madrigals get their powers but since mirabelle didn't get one she didn't just not receive a power it meant that she had to remain in the nursery so in the eyes of the family she never fully became an adult which is why no one relies on her honestly if i had to identify a core irritant i would attribute that to the parts of this film that are still trying to be too conventional like the most frequent pacing critique is that the movie's ending feels like it comes on too fast which wouldn't have been a problem if the movie didn't have to clock at 90. but we'll get to that but another iffy attribute is the movie needing to have all of these action-adventure bits that are weakly narratively relevant when otherwise the movie has been doing perfectly fine allowing the visual and musical energy to drive the excitement and entertainment particularly the one scene that feels kind of superfluous and padded to me is bruno's room almost like it's a compromise to the kind of people who would go this movie needs an adventure thing we can't have an animated family movie without an adventure thing if only just to put in the trailer sometimes movies do have scenes that don't serve a lot of narrative function other than what the movie might need tonally like we need a funny pick me up here or we need a moment to catch our breath i mean tell me what the narrative purpose of be our guest is really it's just that be our guest is a really fun iconic visually intricate musical number and this is basically two to three minutes of silence of mirabelle going in to retrieve a rock so basically the scene is the equivalent of kristoff and frozen two it's not that the scene has no value just not quite enough to warrant the amount of screen time it's taking up i mean i guess it makes bruno as an entity look creepier to give his reveal more punch but that's exactly what we don't talk about bruno is for or they wanted an instance of mirabelle doing a dangerous thing to prove how capable she is even without powers whereas a quicker and better integrated dose of action intention is mirabelle chasing bruno through the walls and you know where this is the most nonsensical mirabelle trying to get the candle when the house is falling apart like why because it's the kind of sort of climax and we kinda need an action thing and like frozen two i understand that the reason why a lot of these exist is some of these being left over from previous drafts and not having enough time to do something new and on that note the deleted scenes are sometimes a great insight into the movie's creation process though this time there's only a few interesting details one is that isabella used to have a boyfriend which i'm glad they got rid of for multiple reasons including that that scene had the longest makeout scene in a disney film but also when you think about it it's not totally necessary if a boyle's whole thing is just about turning isabella into a magical baby maker it really shouldn't matter by who i guess it's just that that guy was really enthusiastic about having babies the other detail inside of that deleted scene was when isabella alludes that mirabelle has a tendency for telling on her which i think makes a lot of sense given some issues that mirabelle must have with isabella but also gives us a more founded reason for isabella's dislike of her which in the current movie has no explanation though the implication is that isabella is envious of mirabelle for not having the same family obligations that she does or that she internalized abuela's restrained hostility toward her so about abuela i think a quiet reconciliation between the generations rather than manufacturing another sort of last minute ticking clock action thing cause that happened way too much this year was the right direction for this especially since abuela's flashback did manage to get a lot of people emotionally enough to validate it as a climax but you still get your batch of lukewarm takes of abuela needing to be held accountable now i don't necessarily disagree with the broad sentiment of this but i will also ask is it that you think that the movie doesn't make clear enough that what abuela did was messed up and terrible and also how what did you want her to be bodily thrown from the house or just yelled at more actually that louder one might have done it if there's something that would have made this more satisfying it might have been not to just have mirabelle standing up to abuela julieta has been pushing back on abuela throughout the film but honestly there should have been a massive family fight where all the secrets come tumbling out and that's what makes the house fall apart and after seeing all of these things that everyone has been hiding really makes clear to abuela how much her pressure has been hurting them because i don't actually think the problem here is abuela not being punished enough i just think it's another case of in a story that has superpowered individuals somehow the most unbelievable element is the older person in a position of power that actually admits that they were wrong in a timely and efficient manner the suspension of disbelief is just too great and i can only think the reason they didn't do that was cause nobody thought of it or that disney just wanted to limit the amount of family yelling or is it that it suddenly wouldn't have made sense for the prophecy to only feature mirabelle who cares she still started it heck it's always the prophecy's fault this is why there's such frustrating narrative devices though honestly i think that encanto still probably is one of the best uses of it besides the prophecy isn't actually about maribel breaking the house it's her healing the house which honestly has the same problem and that's our last minor point some people get really hung up on the fact that mirabelle didn't get a gift i don't know maybe because the entire point of the film is that mirabelle is still worthwhile without one but more about whether all the other family members should have gotten their powers back which kind of sounds like the should joe have died at the end of seoul question from last year which i've given my take on but here kind of depends on your interpretation of what the powers represent because arguably it's part of who they are and even their family bond they lost it when the family fractured and it's back once they did the work to make it whole again and i have dwelled way too much on what are extremely minor grievances and what is otherwise a really fantastic film sure it's fun to speculate on how this movie could have been different but what really makes me happy is that despite all of these details that could be perceived as problems there's still such an enormous amount of encanto celebration at least going on right now because for so many people encanto managed to get the most important things right amazing music themes characters visuals all things that can keep a film afloat even if the story is weak and the story isn't weak if anything it's that there's too much potential here that it couldn't be contained and people want more so good news it's very likely we're gonna get more so animaniacs tell me how did you feel about encanto and again we play the how long until i get the end of the year list up so [Music] you

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Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022