You might expect Walt Disney Animation to pull out all the stops for their 60th animated feature, yet “Encanto” is a fairly routine Disney affair on the surface. Great songs, great animation, and a slightly more complicated than your average fair story. Yet, “Encanto” has far more going on under the hood than one might initially think, resulting in a film that prioritizes emotion over everything else and resulting in Disney’s best animated film since “Zootopia.”
Focusing on the family Madrigal, the film follows Mirabel as she struggles with being the only member of her family without a fantastical gift while also being the only one who notices their sentient house Casita beginning to break down. It's refreshing that, despite a pair of star-studded leads in Stephanie Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “Short Term 12”) as Mirabel and John Leguizamo (“Ice Age,” “Carlito’s Way”) as estranged uncle Bruno, most of the cast consists of Latina stars who would be otherwise widely unknown to American audiences.
It gives the project an energy of authenticity and helps to further flesh out the world through their delivery. María Cecilia Botero (“La Bruja,” “Nuevo rico, nuevo pobre”) voices Abuela Alma Madrigal, the family’s matriarch and leads the film as much as the character leads the family, and the rest of the cast consists of Mauro Castillo, Jessica Darrow (“Feast of the Seven Fishes”), Angie Cepeda (“Love in the Time of Cholera,” “Pobre Diabla”), Carolina Gaitán (“Sin senos sí hay paraíso,” “Isa TK+”), Diane Guerrero (“Orange is the New Black,” “Doom Patrol”) Wilmer Calderrama (“That 70’s Show,” “NCIS”), Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz (“Marvel’s Runaways”), and Ravi-Cabot Conyers (“#blackAF”). Given that the film focuses on a family as its central plot and conflict, each vocal performance is integral and thankfully excellent. There’s not a weak link here, either in regular speech or singing voice.
Speaking of music, Lin-Manuel Miranda (“In the Heights,” “Hamilton”) has contributed both to the story of the film and has written eight original songs for the film. Each song has a different sort of flavor, flowing between grand musical gestures. The opening track “The Family Madrigal” has a larger than life Broadway flavor to it, with later tracks like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and “Surface Pressure” having a more spoken word gossip and rap flavor, respectively.
Sure, the music sounds great, but the ways they’re presented in the film feel far more physical than in previous Disney works. There’s a lot more specific looking choreography in this film, and while the opening is more of a flowing, “walking around town” kind of Disney opener, later tracks like “Bruno” or “Pressure” have specific kinds of dances. It gives these moments very certain moods, making sure the audience understands the emotions behind them not just through the music, but through the movement as well.
Beatriz and Leguizamo might be more well known for comedic roles, but the pair have excellent chemistry here in some of the film’s darker moments. Leguizamo in particular is excellent throughout the film, and is likely the breakout performance, overpowering the extreme optimism and heart of Beatriz’s Mirabel.
This is, once again, another Disney animated feature without a strict antagonist, following in the more metaphorical footsteps of works like “Ralph Breaks the Internet” and “Frozen 2.” While both of those films had issues with this concept, “Encanto” embraces the free form nature of this kind of internalized conflict. It’s a very talky film, one of the most of any recent Disney film, and a majority of the film centers around trying to solve the mystery at the core of it all. It creates a fun journey as we follow Mirabel along, trying to piece things together alongside her.
It's weird to say, given that Disney films have never really been lacking in emotion, but “Encanto” feels like their heaviest and most emotion forward film in quite a while. The focus on family and the issues and loves therein is palpable since we genuinely buy the love between all of these characters. This isn’t even getting into the various metaphorical themes at play with Mirabel not receiving a gift from the family’s magic and feeling ostracized because of it.
Of course, given the massive budget and an environment like Columbia to pull inspiration from, the entire film is a colorful, gorgeous work of art from start to finish. Each location is brimming with different texture details, and the moments when the art style shifts for specific songs make big impacts. Casita the house may not have a voice, but their presence is definitely felt throughout, thanks to some wonderfully clever uses of objects and animation on a grander scale.
The last time Disney Animation Studios broke from their sequel or princess films was with 2016’s “Zootopia” and it was without a doubt their best film in years. The same is true here, as “Encanto” embraces the musical genre with life and color. The physicality of both the animation and musical numbers is something Disney doesn’t typically do and adds so much here. A more complex than normal narrative and emotional core lends some brains to this animated outing and helps to lift “Encanto” up as one of the Mouse House’s easiest to recommend in quite a while 5/5
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