Disney’s Latin adventure is a dazzling out-and-out delight
Encanto PG cert, 109 min
★★★★★
Dirs: Jared Bush, Byron Howard Starring: Stephanie Beatriz, María Cecilia Botero, John Leguizamo, Diane Guerrero, Jessica Darrow, Ravi Cabot-conyers (voices)
It’s been a vintage year for cinema in three fields especially: musicals, animation, and things involving Linmanuel Miranda. Encanto, the 60th feature from Walt Disney Animation Studios, ticks all of the boxes above, which arguably makes it the most 2021 film of 2021. Inarguably, it’s an out-and-out delight.
Miranda, the never knowingly under-occupied creator of In the Heights and Hamilton, has composed a suite of new Latin and hip-hopflavoured songs for this lusciously rendered, shrewdly introspective swashbuckling adventure, about a young woman who feels surplus to community requirements. Her name is Mirabel Madrigal (Stephanie Beatriz), and she lives in a village nestled deep in the Colombian mountains, where an enchanted candle grants every member of her family a civically useful superpower when they come of age. The place was founded by Mirabel’s redoubtable grandmother Alma (María Cecilia Botero), a civil war widow whose traumatic past also furnished her with the magical gifts for which her family have come to be renowned.
Mirabel’s sisters Isabela (Diane Guerrero) and Luisa (Jessica Darrow) can respectively make flowers bloom at will and shoulder extraordinary weights – one glides around in a Fragonard flurry of blossom, while the other could rival Obelix’s menhirlugging vigour. Her mother Julieta (Angie Cepeda), meanwhile, can rustle up regional delicacies with healing powers. But when the time came for Mirabel’s own blessing to emerge, the candle demurred, and now she’s left wondering what on earth she’s good for, while her relatives rearrange, sustain and beautify the township. At least Mirabel has the support of her house – which is sentient, and as much a family pet as it is a place of residence.
Encanto’s animation is dazzling in all sorts of ways, with technical effects
Some of the technical effects would have been unimaginable even a year ago
and flights of creative fancy that would have been unimaginable even a year ago, particularly during the musical numbers. (Surface Pressure, sung by the much-put-upon Luisa, is a standout.) But imbuing a building with the personality of a hundred-ton puppy is perhaps the most impressive visual feat here. How on earth do you make a staircase show enthusiasm, or a window express sympathy, or a tiled floor chivvy its occupants along as if it’s nuzzling at their heels? Encanto does all of this, and makes it look easy – since the animators ensure the emotions themselves can be read with ease.
So when the candle’s flame begins to gutter and the family’s powers start to wane, it’s deeper into the house that Mirabel must go, in order to find out what’s amiss. For once, the quest to set things right doesn’t involve an outward journey: instead, it plays out in the building’s network of cobwebby passageways and Tardis-like secret chambers. That setting perhaps robs
Encanto of the grand emotional swell of, say, Tangled or Moana, but it aligns cleverly with the story’s theme – even families that seem to be thriving need to tend to their foundations – while giving Mirabel’s adventure an Indiana Jones-like quality that feels novel within this particular field.
Directors Byron Howard and Jared Bush’s previous film was Zootropolis,
which was released in 2016 alongside
Moana – an unexpected and dynamic double-bill from a studio long regarded as the fairytale princess place. Disney Animation’s 2021 crop – this, plus Raya and the Last Dragon
– shows the same thrilling breadth of ambition. At a time when the corporation’s live-action output keeps doubling down on the franchise grind, here from just over the garden fence is a lesson in storytelling that feels at once elegantly classical and zingily fresh.