Disney Animation: Where all the people are fantastical and magical
There's no reason other than arbitrary numerology to compare the 2010 animated feature Tangled with the 2021 animated feature Encanto: the first is Official Disney Animated Feature #50 (a number arrived at with some corporate fudging, since it includes 2000's Dinosaur, which really shouldn't count; on the other hand, 1943's Victory Through Air Power really should count and doesn't, so the math works out the same), and the second is Official Disney Animated Feature #60. That's enough to get a nostalgic soul like me thinking, and what I've thought of is that both of these features do a pretty good job of representing the state of Walt Disney Animation Studios at the point in history they came out. In 2010: there's a spirit of rejuvenation, the ugly doldrums of the past decade have given way to a new spirit of simultaneously re-embracing the company's historical strengths while using new technology to push forward, The Princess and the Frog is just a year old and at least for the moment, the illusion of traditional 2-D animation and computer-generated 3-D animation walking hand-in-hand together as the alpha and omega of Disney's artistic output remains steady. And thus Tangled, a new-fashioned old-school fairy tale musical with great characters and a playfully simple but never stale story.
In 2021: the Disney corporation has become the inescapable, ugly fact of life around which all of television and cinema must bend themselves, and this has brought with it a hideous "fuck you, we don't have to care" feeling of inevitability; the studio's films will all turn a profit, so why bother making them good? Every one of the studio's features looks more or less the same - some put more emphasis on lighting, some on effects animation, some on color, but they're all coming from the same design mentality, and none of them have particularly good character animation. Meanwhile, it would appear that nobody left at the studio remembers literally anything about story structure: in the last decade, only 2014's Big Hero 6 and 2016's Moana could be genuinely described as having "good bones", and in the case of the former, it got them by sticking 100% to the superhero movie formula that had gotten locked into place by that point.
And thus Encanto, which even by the fallen (and falling!) standards of contemporary Disney has an amazingly broken story. It took no fewer the six credited people to put it together, too: Jared Bush & Byron Howard (the film's two directors) & Charise Castro Smith (the "co-director", which typically meant "the trainee", but has lately meant "the insurance against charges of cultural insensitivity") & Jason Hand & Nancy Kruse & Lin-Manuel Miranda (who also wrote the film's eight original songs); Castro Smith & Bush got the screenplay credit. That's an impressively long list for a film whose drama-and-I-am-using-the-term-loosely consists of "a girl talks to each member of her large family, one at a time".
The girl is Mirabel Madrigal (Stephanie Beatriz), the second-youngest member of the Madrigal family, leads of an isolated Colombian village in the mountains. Correction: an isolated magical village (which I think is what is what "encanto" refers to; at any rate, it's not "charm, appeal", which is what I though the word meant). Many years ago, when Mirabel's abuela Alma (María Cecilia Botero) was young and her children were just babies, she and her husband were forced out of their home by a non-specified group of soldiers; the husband died, but at the moment of his death, a magical candle appeared, blasting the soldiers away, raising the mountains around the glade where Alma found herself, creating an ever-expanding sentient house for her and her children to live in, and blessing every member of the Madrigal family with a single magical power, which they receive from magical glowing doors that appear in the house. This system worked well for the Madrigals, who built a thriving village over which they happily reign (one of Encanto's most obvious blind spots is that the Madrigals are, as presented here, fairly unambiguously, benevolent despots), but the most recent child to come of age received no power. That was Mirabel herself, and for some years now, she's been as nervous as the rest of her family about what that means; today is the day that things might finally get back on track, though, since Mirabel's cousin Antonio (Ravi-Cabot Conyers) is set to receive his power, and as long as things go right this time, everyone will start to breathe a great big sigh of relief. Or not, since after his ceremony goes off without a hitch, Mirabel notices cracks appearing in the walls of Casa Madrigal. And since nobody else notices them before they are mysteriously repaired - or disappeared - she decides to do a little detective work. Which entirely consists of talking to each member of her large family, one at a time.
Lay it out like that, and it sounds like Encanto has a plot. In practice, though, the film is shapeless as all hell, and the scenes feel less like the gradual unfolding of a mystery, more like those six scenarists had a bunch of ideas for individual bits and just scattered them, in a fairly arbitrary order, across the film's unhurried length. The film has a late confrontation that seems like a climax, and this retroactively creates the impression that everything preceding that point was in some sense building up to it, but certainly in the moment of watching there's no feeling of momentum, just idle moments. Making things worse, that confrontation doesn't actually go anywhere: the characters involved learned the lessons they had ought to, and then the film reaches its natural, graceful endpoint where everyone has changed for the better because of what has happened, and then the film gets very excited and says, "but hey, what if we pressed a giant reset button and made it so that literally nothing has been learned, except for the dubious lesson that you're special even if you don't have special powers, but you're definitely more special if you do"?
It's just remarkably empty as anything but a collection of moments. Some of them are cuter, or funnier, or more sentimental, than others, but they're just moments, they don't build up to anything. We don't learn much of anything about who the Madrigals are, and what we learn is pure cliché - clichés blatant enough that for the most part, the family members' magic powers are trite stand-ins for their personality. For example, Mirabel's mother, Julieta (Angie Cepeda), can heal people with food - like mothers do all around the world. Mirabel's sister, Luisa (Jessica Darrow), is super-strong and supports everybody - like big sisters do all around the world. Mirabel's aunt, Pepa (Carolina Gaitán), controls the weather with her moods - like aunts wait what the fuck? I think you can strain to make this one symbolic: the person whose personality is so strong that her mood ends up affecting everybody else in the house? I mean, it's not elegant, but I can make it work. Same thing with Pepa's daughter Dolores (Adassa), who has super-sensitive hearing - the lack of privacy in a crowded houseful of extended family? Good enough.
When Encanto works, it works almost solely because Mirabel is an affable protagonist, and Beatriz fills her voice with peppy can-do enthusiasm that's as much about a deep-rooted fear of being found out as someone who in fact cannot-do, as because she's the bright-eyed start of a Disney musical. She makes an immediate good impression breezing her way through the rhyming exposition of "The Family Madrigal", the soundtrack's best song with English lyrics, and one of two that I'd say rises up overall to the level of "very good" (the other is the nostalgic, wistful ballad "Dos Oruguitas", and I am unsure how much of my esteem for it - it's easily my favorite number in the film - is because it's slower than everything else, and how much is because I can't understand the words). It's maybe the highlight of the entire film, for that matter; in general, the movie cannot figure out how to motivate any of its musical numbers, which largely function as plot-stopping inner monologues married to random non-diegetic imagery. Some of them have effectively striking use of color: the blank, fully-saturated backdrops of Luisa's panicked rap about self-doubt "Surface Pressure", look especially great, and the character animation on that character is never better than as we watch her face contort into different expressions of burdened fatigue. Together these things take away some of the sting of what might be the very worst lines I am familiar with that Miranda has written:
"I'm the strong one
"I'm not nervous
"I'm as tough as the crust of the earth is
"I move mountains
"I move churches
"And I glow 'cause I know what my worth is"
-in which the best-case scenario is that Miranda is trying to get away with rhyming "nervous" and "earth is", and the worst is that he's trying to rhyme "strong one" with "mountain" (and God bless Darrow, she really does try everything she can to mangle those words in a way that sort of vaguely sells the rhyme; it's not the least reason that she's my second-favorite vocal performance in the movie), while gliding by on the unapologetically boring "earth is / worth is" pairing.
But the point is, the musical numbers in Encanto largely fall a bit flat, doing very little work for the movie; but then, given its vague story, what would "working for the movie" look like? I would say in general that the music is better than the lyrics (except in the baldly expository "We Don't Talk About Bruno", where they are about equally uninteresting), and that's probably the better trade-off to make; it gives the film a certain momentum and vital energy when the music bounces along as well as it mostly does here, between Miranda's songs and Germaine Franco's score. Thankfully, Encanto is rarely boring or slow, which would be easily traps for something so shapeless to fall into. I was saying, though, that Mirabel's introduction through "The Family Madrigal" gives us an immediate impression of her personality as someone perhaps desperately committed to putting a happy spin on whatever situation she finds herself in, a certain sense that her value to other people lies in being trivially ingratiating that feeds into the film's extremely unsurprising reveals about her role in the Madrigal household.
So we have her to cling to, at least. And I suppose it has to be conceded that Encanto is fun to look at, though not so crazy, over-the-top fun that it's worth writing home about. Disney's other 2021 release, Raya and the Last Dragon, is unmistakably the more impressive technical achievement, and I would still say the more "beautiful" film (though Encanto has the better use of color) which mostly leaves this one with just having energetic, playful animation, and it does at least have that. The living house is an especially nice achievement, with such simple bits of movement as flopping open its shutters or rattling floor tiles giving a strong impression of its "character" (indeed, the house has a more salient personality that all but, at most, four of the humans in the cast).
At a certain point, though, one has to wonder: is this doing anything with its visual energy? Does Encanto look nice in ways that other CG animated features that spent an equal amount of time and money on the rendering process do not? I can't say that it does. Just within 2021 and the friendly confines of the Walt Disney Company, Pixar's Luca does a lot of the same stuff that we see here in terms of bright colors and peppy movement, and even though I had no real love for that film or its aesthetic, it definitely has an aesthetic, one that takes a decisive step back from realism to enjoy the soft, diffuse look of its world as a kind of glowing land of toys. Take away the color saturation, and Encanto looks awfully like every other Disney feature for the last several years, with the single exception that its character designs are a bit more rubbery and variable than in most Disney features of late (and even then, there's less variability here than in Luca, let alone between Luca and any other given Pixar film). It is very, very hard not to feel like this is a factory-produced object, given a veneer of unique identity through music, color, and arguably setting (although "drop generic characters into a culture we haven't set a movie in before" is itself becoming part of the Disney formula at this point). But it's not much of a veneer. I don't know how much of it is that great big 60 that opens the film, and how much is that there's just not any story there to distract me, but I can't help but feel like Encanto perfectly typifies the limits of DIsney's take on 3-D animation. At the very least - and the empty husk of its story is certainly part of this - it typifies the unabashed laziness of a studio that gained enough market control to make money without even trying, and therefore immediately stopped trying.
In 2021: the Disney corporation has become the inescapable, ugly fact of life around which all of television and cinema must bend themselves, and this has brought with it a hideous "fuck you, we don't have to care" feeling of inevitability; the studio's films will all turn a profit, so why bother making them good? Every one of the studio's features looks more or less the same - some put more emphasis on lighting, some on effects animation, some on color, but they're all coming from the same design mentality, and none of them have particularly good character animation. Meanwhile, it would appear that nobody left at the studio remembers literally anything about story structure: in the last decade, only 2014's Big Hero 6 and 2016's Moana could be genuinely described as having "good bones", and in the case of the former, it got them by sticking 100% to the superhero movie formula that had gotten locked into place by that point.
And thus Encanto, which even by the fallen (and falling!) standards of contemporary Disney has an amazingly broken story. It took no fewer the six credited people to put it together, too: Jared Bush & Byron Howard (the film's two directors) & Charise Castro Smith (the "co-director", which typically meant "the trainee", but has lately meant "the insurance against charges of cultural insensitivity") & Jason Hand & Nancy Kruse & Lin-Manuel Miranda (who also wrote the film's eight original songs); Castro Smith & Bush got the screenplay credit. That's an impressively long list for a film whose drama-and-I-am-using-the-term-loosely consists of "a girl talks to each member of her large family, one at a time".
The girl is Mirabel Madrigal (Stephanie Beatriz), the second-youngest member of the Madrigal family, leads of an isolated Colombian village in the mountains. Correction: an isolated magical village (which I think is what is what "encanto" refers to; at any rate, it's not "charm, appeal", which is what I though the word meant). Many years ago, when Mirabel's abuela Alma (María Cecilia Botero) was young and her children were just babies, she and her husband were forced out of their home by a non-specified group of soldiers; the husband died, but at the moment of his death, a magical candle appeared, blasting the soldiers away, raising the mountains around the glade where Alma found herself, creating an ever-expanding sentient house for her and her children to live in, and blessing every member of the Madrigal family with a single magical power, which they receive from magical glowing doors that appear in the house. This system worked well for the Madrigals, who built a thriving village over which they happily reign (one of Encanto's most obvious blind spots is that the Madrigals are, as presented here, fairly unambiguously, benevolent despots), but the most recent child to come of age received no power. That was Mirabel herself, and for some years now, she's been as nervous as the rest of her family about what that means; today is the day that things might finally get back on track, though, since Mirabel's cousin Antonio (Ravi-Cabot Conyers) is set to receive his power, and as long as things go right this time, everyone will start to breathe a great big sigh of relief. Or not, since after his ceremony goes off without a hitch, Mirabel notices cracks appearing in the walls of Casa Madrigal. And since nobody else notices them before they are mysteriously repaired - or disappeared - she decides to do a little detective work. Which entirely consists of talking to each member of her large family, one at a time.
Lay it out like that, and it sounds like Encanto has a plot. In practice, though, the film is shapeless as all hell, and the scenes feel less like the gradual unfolding of a mystery, more like those six scenarists had a bunch of ideas for individual bits and just scattered them, in a fairly arbitrary order, across the film's unhurried length. The film has a late confrontation that seems like a climax, and this retroactively creates the impression that everything preceding that point was in some sense building up to it, but certainly in the moment of watching there's no feeling of momentum, just idle moments. Making things worse, that confrontation doesn't actually go anywhere: the characters involved learned the lessons they had ought to, and then the film reaches its natural, graceful endpoint where everyone has changed for the better because of what has happened, and then the film gets very excited and says, "but hey, what if we pressed a giant reset button and made it so that literally nothing has been learned, except for the dubious lesson that you're special even if you don't have special powers, but you're definitely more special if you do"?
It's just remarkably empty as anything but a collection of moments. Some of them are cuter, or funnier, or more sentimental, than others, but they're just moments, they don't build up to anything. We don't learn much of anything about who the Madrigals are, and what we learn is pure cliché - clichés blatant enough that for the most part, the family members' magic powers are trite stand-ins for their personality. For example, Mirabel's mother, Julieta (Angie Cepeda), can heal people with food - like mothers do all around the world. Mirabel's sister, Luisa (Jessica Darrow), is super-strong and supports everybody - like big sisters do all around the world. Mirabel's aunt, Pepa (Carolina Gaitán), controls the weather with her moods - like aunts wait what the fuck? I think you can strain to make this one symbolic: the person whose personality is so strong that her mood ends up affecting everybody else in the house? I mean, it's not elegant, but I can make it work. Same thing with Pepa's daughter Dolores (Adassa), who has super-sensitive hearing - the lack of privacy in a crowded houseful of extended family? Good enough.
When Encanto works, it works almost solely because Mirabel is an affable protagonist, and Beatriz fills her voice with peppy can-do enthusiasm that's as much about a deep-rooted fear of being found out as someone who in fact cannot-do, as because she's the bright-eyed start of a Disney musical. She makes an immediate good impression breezing her way through the rhyming exposition of "The Family Madrigal", the soundtrack's best song with English lyrics, and one of two that I'd say rises up overall to the level of "very good" (the other is the nostalgic, wistful ballad "Dos Oruguitas", and I am unsure how much of my esteem for it - it's easily my favorite number in the film - is because it's slower than everything else, and how much is because I can't understand the words). It's maybe the highlight of the entire film, for that matter; in general, the movie cannot figure out how to motivate any of its musical numbers, which largely function as plot-stopping inner monologues married to random non-diegetic imagery. Some of them have effectively striking use of color: the blank, fully-saturated backdrops of Luisa's panicked rap about self-doubt "Surface Pressure", look especially great, and the character animation on that character is never better than as we watch her face contort into different expressions of burdened fatigue. Together these things take away some of the sting of what might be the very worst lines I am familiar with that Miranda has written:
"I'm the strong one
"I'm not nervous
"I'm as tough as the crust of the earth is
"I move mountains
"I move churches
"And I glow 'cause I know what my worth is"
-in which the best-case scenario is that Miranda is trying to get away with rhyming "nervous" and "earth is", and the worst is that he's trying to rhyme "strong one" with "mountain" (and God bless Darrow, she really does try everything she can to mangle those words in a way that sort of vaguely sells the rhyme; it's not the least reason that she's my second-favorite vocal performance in the movie), while gliding by on the unapologetically boring "earth is / worth is" pairing.
But the point is, the musical numbers in Encanto largely fall a bit flat, doing very little work for the movie; but then, given its vague story, what would "working for the movie" look like? I would say in general that the music is better than the lyrics (except in the baldly expository "We Don't Talk About Bruno", where they are about equally uninteresting), and that's probably the better trade-off to make; it gives the film a certain momentum and vital energy when the music bounces along as well as it mostly does here, between Miranda's songs and Germaine Franco's score. Thankfully, Encanto is rarely boring or slow, which would be easily traps for something so shapeless to fall into. I was saying, though, that Mirabel's introduction through "The Family Madrigal" gives us an immediate impression of her personality as someone perhaps desperately committed to putting a happy spin on whatever situation she finds herself in, a certain sense that her value to other people lies in being trivially ingratiating that feeds into the film's extremely unsurprising reveals about her role in the Madrigal household.
So we have her to cling to, at least. And I suppose it has to be conceded that Encanto is fun to look at, though not so crazy, over-the-top fun that it's worth writing home about. Disney's other 2021 release, Raya and the Last Dragon, is unmistakably the more impressive technical achievement, and I would still say the more "beautiful" film (though Encanto has the better use of color) which mostly leaves this one with just having energetic, playful animation, and it does at least have that. The living house is an especially nice achievement, with such simple bits of movement as flopping open its shutters or rattling floor tiles giving a strong impression of its "character" (indeed, the house has a more salient personality that all but, at most, four of the humans in the cast).
At a certain point, though, one has to wonder: is this doing anything with its visual energy? Does Encanto look nice in ways that other CG animated features that spent an equal amount of time and money on the rendering process do not? I can't say that it does. Just within 2021 and the friendly confines of the Walt Disney Company, Pixar's Luca does a lot of the same stuff that we see here in terms of bright colors and peppy movement, and even though I had no real love for that film or its aesthetic, it definitely has an aesthetic, one that takes a decisive step back from realism to enjoy the soft, diffuse look of its world as a kind of glowing land of toys. Take away the color saturation, and Encanto looks awfully like every other Disney feature for the last several years, with the single exception that its character designs are a bit more rubbery and variable than in most Disney features of late (and even then, there's less variability here than in Luca, let alone between Luca and any other given Pixar film). It is very, very hard not to feel like this is a factory-produced object, given a veneer of unique identity through music, color, and arguably setting (although "drop generic characters into a culture we haven't set a movie in before" is itself becoming part of the Disney formula at this point). But it's not much of a veneer. I don't know how much of it is that great big 60 that opens the film, and how much is that there's just not any story there to distract me, but I can't help but feel like Encanto perfectly typifies the limits of DIsney's take on 3-D animation. At the very least - and the empty husk of its story is certainly part of this - it typifies the unabashed laziness of a studio that gained enough market control to make money without even trying, and therefore immediately stopped trying.
