Encanto Film Review & Analysis

​“Abre tus ojos,” — Open your eyes. From its opening lines uttered in darkness, Walt Disney Animation’s Encanto urges its audience to see: To see others, to see themselves and to see others in themselves.

 

For all its cultural weight, much of Disney Animation’s canon is limited in scope. Its most revered films — from Snow White, Peter Pan and Cinderella, to Beauty and the Beast, and The Little Mermaid — have arisen out of Eurocentric, heteronormative and white male perspectives, with a true “happily ever after” being reserved for the select few.

 

Recent Disney Animation films have featured more diverse heroes and heroines subverting traditional tropes, but Encanto represents a new stage in the studio’s evolution. While it doesn’t have the instant-ear-worm songs that have defined many Disney classics, the Colombian-set film infuses a prescient, culturally-inclusive message into the familiar storytelling staples that have given the most beloved Disney animated films their heart and longevity: Anyone can be a hero, and anything can be fixed, as long as we work together.

 

The film begins in tragedy as Alma recites her history: After fleeing an armed conflict with her newborn children, her husband Pedro gives his own life to ensure their safe escape. Through that sacrifice, Alma is given a miracle: a magical candle that creates a protective oasis around her and her family, grants special gifts to each of her descendants and constructs a sentient home — Casita — that is as much a character as any of them.

 

As the family is introduced in “Welcome to the Family Madrigal,” the audience is treated to a series of tropes and motifs from Disney Animation’s canon. Sister Luisa’s feats of strength are set against a red and purple backdrop of rotating, rapid-fire tableaus for a musical number that visually evokes the Genie’s “Friend Like Me,” from Aladdin. The cheeky Casita echoes the enchanted decor from the castle in Beauty and the Beast, complete with a walking clock. When little brother Antonio’s special gift is revealed to be the ability to talk with animals, his secret jungle room in Casita is unveiled in a scene whose palate and camera motions call to mind 1999’s Tarzan.

 

Then, there’s the film’s protagonist, Mirabel. While her family’s gifts are a roll call of heroic literature’s greatest hits — super strength, botanokinesis, enhanced senses, shapeshifting, weather control and the ability to read the future — Mirabel is seemingly ordinary, with frizzy hair, glasses, a short and stout frame and no apparent special ability, much to Alma’s disappointment and shame. 

 

Early in the first act, Mirabel’s mother Julieta (Angie Cepeda) — who can heal injuries with her cooking — expresses her greatest desire to her daughter: “I wish you could see yourself the way I do.” As powerful as her gift is, she cannot heal her daughter’s heart. Nor can she heal the deep scars her family hides, scars which manifest physically as cracks begin to form on Casita’s walls.

 

Mirabel is, at first, the only one who can see the damage, as Alma refuses to publicly acknowledge it. As the web of fissures becomes harder to ignore, the magical candle dims and the family’s powers begin to fade. Mirabel wonders aloud: “How do I save a miracle?”

 

Determined to uncover what is at the root of the house’s decay, Maribel goes to Luisa, the super-strong family powerhouse, who tries to deny that she, too, feels something is amiss. As Luisa name checks Hercules (himself a former Disney leading man) and evokes his Twelve Labors (she piles a dozen donkeys on her shoulders and diverts a river), she admits that the expectations she faces because of her strength are a tremendous burden. She literally buckles under the weight of the Casita — symbolizing her family’s legacy — during her song, appropriately titled “Surface Pressure."

 

Cousin Camilo’s ability to change shape — associated with tricksters like Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson in Moana) and the Norse god-turned-Marvel villain Loki — is revealed to be an expression of his own uncertain sense of identity. Throughout the film, he tries on different faces, genders, body types, ages and skin tones reflecting a village population descended from native, European and African ancestry.

 

Perfectly perfect sister Isabela is a self-referential riff on nature-communing Disney princesses like Snow White and Aurora, but reveals late in the film’s second act that she has a rebellious side that’s more than a little bit punk rock. She confides in Mirabel that the only reason she is going to accept the marriage proposal of the hunkiest guy in town — Mariano Guzman — is because that’s what the family expects her to do. It’s later revealed that Mariano (voiced by Maluma), actually wants to marry super-hearing cousin Dolores (her name referring to the fact that the ability to hear everyone’s secrets is a real “pain”).

 

Underneath superpowers that would make the Avengers blush, each Madrigal exhibits classical psychological and emotional reactions to shared trauma. For the family, that shared trauma is their harrowing origin story, which culminated in Pedro’s sacrifice that ensured their safety and first lit the candle’s flame. Because the price of their freedom — and their miracle — was so high, each Madrigal feels the need to prove their worth, to live up to Alma’s expectations.

 

It is only when Mirabel goes rogue — bringing estranged (and downright strange) prognosticating uncle Bruno (John Leguizamo) back into the fold and setting Isabela free from her emotional confinement — that the family finally confronts its insecurities. 

 

Mirabel’s true gift isn’t a supernatural one, but it can be exceedingly rare: Empathy. It is through empathy that Maribel literally fits the broken pieces of her family back together, and as the family reunites with its community to rebuild Casita, the name Julieta gave her daughter makes sense: “behold wondrous beauty.”

 

The lack of self identity, the struggle to fit in, the codependence and the fear under which the Madrigal clan labors are all a part of everyday life for the children and grandchildren of immigrants, but they are not exclusive to them. Those psychological struggles know no race, no gender, no nationality.  In a world more deeply fractured than ever, a world finally — and painfully — reckoning with the foundational sins of its past, it is not through shared trauma that the world heals, but through empathy.

 

As much as the film addresses these very human truths, it also addresses legacy: What do we pass on? What do we leave behind? 

 

Luisa’s fear of inadequacy in the face of her own strength, Isabela’s fear of inadequacy, Camilo’s uncertain identity and Alma’s haughty arrogance can very well be ascribed to Disney Animation, itself. 

 

For all the glory of its past, the studio long struggled with a changing world. Classic Disney princesses rarely had agency of their own, waiting for their princes to save them. Even during the Disney Renaissance, Ariel’s sidekick Sebastian was a racist caricature of Caribbean peoples. Aladdin and Jasmine were given light skin and caucasian features, while their antagonists were drawn as exaggerated Middle Eastern caricatures. Pocahontas whitewashed the brutal colonization of the Americas and ignored inconvenient historical facts.

 

This is the legacy under which the studio has labored, much like Luisa bearing up the weight of the Casita. In 2009, The Princess and the Frog, allowed Black audiences to see themselves as Disney princesses for the first time. Frozen subverted the heteronormative “true love’s kiss” trope. “Moana” proved that global fairytales and folklore have universal resonance. 

 

With Encanto, Disney Animation looks at the world, looks at itself and looks to the future. Of all the songs penned for the film by Lin-Manuel Miranda, it is Mirabel’s “Waiting on a Miracle,” that says it best: “All I need is a change / All I need is a chance / All I know is I can’t / Stay on the side / Open your eyes.”