Disney's Encanto

Miracles On Display

or

"Maybe Your Gift is Being in Denial"
 

After watching Moana last year on a television-sized screen and being overwhelmed by the beauty and color and detail that the Disney animators put into that film (despite watching it in an underwhelming format), I vowed that were I to watch another Disney film of such dexterity, it would have to be in a theater first.

 

And so, with Disney's release of Encanto for this holiday season (in theaters only it should be pointed out), I headed for a theater, lest I miss something, and was not disappointed for making the extra effort.

 

Encanto tells the story of the Madrigal family which, for the story's purposes, begins with a refugee experience, as the young Alma and Pedro Madrigal, with their three toddler children, must flee their homeland from a conflict to a new beginning. Papa Pedro does not survive the trip, sacrificing himself for the family's safety, but his spirit is imbued in a mystical candle, whose eternal flame lights the family home, the Casita, imbuing it with powers that come in very handy on a day-to-day basis, but which presents a gift to each family member as the generations unfold.

The original trio have separate abilities: Julieta (Angie Cepeda) can heal the afflicted with her cooking; Pepa (Carolina Gaitán) can control the weather; and brother Bruno (John Leguizamo) can see the future. Bruno, probably because of this ability, is a family exile as one of Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs explains ("We Don't Talk About Bruno").

Bruno never marries. But Pepa and her husband have a  daughter Dolores (Adassa), who has incredible hearing, son Camilo (Rhenzy Feliz), who can shape-shift, and youngest son Antonio (Ravi Cabot-Conyer), who will gain the gift of talking to animals. Julieta and husband Augustin (Wilmer Valderrama) have three kids—all daughters: Isabela (Diane Guerrero) considered the "perfect child" who can make flowers bloom at will (of course she can!), Luisa (Jessica Darrow), who is exceptionally strong, and Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz), who...has a good personality...but was somehow left out of the cosmic loop when extraordinary abilities were being passed out. She CAN, however, play the accordion.

Well, in this day, when every character in movies has—and everybody on the street claims to have—a super-power, maybe it isn't so unusual that the Familia Madrigal seems to be like The Incredibles or The Avengers (both Disney properties, by the way)...but one should remember that even the Seven Dwarfs—or are we saying "Seven Little Men" now?—had specific character traits, just so you could keep track of them, and in an extended multi-generational family that sort of thing just keeps things from getting out of hand.

Anyway, Mirabel is the "special child" for the mere fact that there is nothing "special" about her (if you don't count having the majority of the songs to sing including the required "'I Want' song" which, here, is "Waiting on a Miracle"), except that she takes that three paragraphs of exposition I just did and squeezes it into a very fast four minute ditty called "The Family Madrigal" which explains the whole thing. Personally, I think her super-power is rhyming "Madrigal" and "autobiographical" and negotiating the hyper-Miranda-rap without seeming to take a breath. She is also awfully good at breaking the "fourth wall" as she does consistently through the movie.

Yeah. Just like that.

Antonio's being bequeathed the gift of talking to animals only emphasizes that Mirabel got squat for powers when it was her time, but she is haunted by a vision of cracks running through the house and destroying it. This sets her on a quest to find out what the heck it is all about and if it has anything to do with Bruno or whether it is some anomaly in magical reality. It's a nice little hero's quest movie without having to do much traveling as the issue is "right upstairs." It's also a movie about gifted people who, at the same time, feel it's a bit of a curse and, rather than make life better, over time it makes things worse. And ultimately it says we're all gifted and we're all gifts. nice. Tough to argue (even though comments sections are filled with people who do).

One thing that constantly surprises me about these things (and I don't think anybody can argue about) is how these animated films keep getting visually richer and more impeccably designed. Every new one I see has left me jolted about how far the technology and design sense has improved. There's a scene here where Mirabel is covered in dust that feels absolutely photo-realistic (even though the character isn't), or the perfection portraying the way a drum-head vibrates when it's hit, and there were a couple of instances where transitions made me think "oh, they've gone live action" only to see with the sight of a figure—"wait, no, they haven't.

Computer animation has come such a long way since the time I was sitting listening to a panel discussion with Pixar animators in 1994 about their revolutionary new release which was being called Toy Story, and remarking that the render time for a scene that involved a woven bed spread required thirty hours for each frame. That first one still doesn't look bad, even though some of the human figures still come out looking a little crude, but now it's getting downright scary how good these features now look. At the beginning, I was looking at some of the Encanto character faces and thinking, "Geez, I should be seeing pores in the skin." Then, two shots later, Grandmama Alma shows up and she has liver spots. Texture and shading has gotten rid of much of the plasticene look of characters, but the artistry and expressiveness possible almost make that a non-consideration anymore.

 

Magical realism, indeed.

Isabela's render time is extremely fast!