ENCANTO. Disney’s Tight and Dense Piece of Cinema

In Encanto, teenage Mirabel may feel a little lonely and a little different from the rest of her family. Love is love, but something is clearly amiss. Her mother can instantly heal even the most brutal fracture. One sister, Luisa, is endowed with strength worthy of Hercules. The other commands all manner of plant life with the skill of Poison Ivy. A fiery cousin controls the weather, and a young cousin has just acquired the gift of understanding animal speech. The Madrigal family home is a place of wonders, spells, and magical objects. Only Mirabel has not gained any extraordinary ability.

It is the heroine herself—unable to fly, see through walls, or run at the speed of light—who falls short of this above-average norm. It does not occupy her mind all day long, but from time to time it gives her pause.

Before long, however, unease begins to hang in the air. The Madrigals’ powers start to fade, and Abuela, the family matriarch, along with Mirabel, are plagued by visions of the entire house collapsing and of dark, non-magical times approaching. Disney fashions its latest animated film from familiar motifs—individual otherness, intergenerational misunderstandings, the uncovering of a family secret—but there is no doubt that Encanto seeks something new.

First and foremost, the filmmakers approach the idea of a journey differently. We do not set off with Mirabel on an expedition beyond the horizon, toward the setting sun; instead, we remain within a single building the entire time, venturing into the psychological dilemmas of the leading characters. The Madrigal house, filled with secret rooms, nooks, hidden passages, and concealed corridors, becomes another fully fledged protagonist. Encanto tells a story of following the unknown on familiar ground. We keep returning to the same rooms, similar problems, and the same characters living under one roof.

Despite its enormous budget and technical grandeur, the film by Jared Bush and Byron Howard adopts a distinct dramatic tone and an unexpected intimacy. Yes, it is a tight and dense piece of cinema—focused at once on large-scale emotions (rejection, fear) and on family relationships on a micro level. It is one of the few Disney animated films that would require very few modifications to work, in a very similar form, on a theatrical stage.

The creators of Encanto naturally flirt with film genres, but they do so deliberately in reverse, bringing intriguing paradoxes to the surface. Disney’s animation subtly winks at the superhero genre (Pixar’s family of The Incredibles is a useful point of reference), yet here it is normality that becomes something super, something extraordinary. Encanto also contains traces of horror cinema and the haunted-house story, but unlike genre convention, the alarm signal for its inhabitants is not when the building gains paranormal abilities, but when it loses them. Doors in bedroom closets opening on their own or moving wooden staircases are standard for the characters. Only when these phenomena disappear do they begin to feel uneasy.

Encanto is a thoroughly written story about the fate of a single family, focused on a handful of slowly evolving characters, confronting different personalities and life attitudes—from withdrawal and shyness to determination. It is also another Disney animation that takes a very creative approach to the figure of the antagonist or villain. He exists, and yet he does not. The destructive force that emerges comes from a highly unexpected place. In recent years, in Moana we triumphantly saved the life-giving energy of the entire planet; in Raya and the Last Dragon we balanced on the brink of war between several feuding lands. Encanto, by contrast, calibrates family relationships. It resolves a certain misunderstanding between grandmother and granddaughter. On the one hand, it is a trifle; on the other, it is genuinely an entire world.