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Disney’s latest is a well animated but contrived, inconsistent, unconvincing slab of everyone’s-special saccharine waterboarding.
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Encanto is Disney’s 60th animated feature, and quite honestly, it feels like the House of Mouse on bland autopilot. Yes, on a technical level it’s splendid, with all the lovely digimation flourishes you’d expect, and directors Jared Bush, Bryon Howard, and Charise Castro Smith putting their colourful boxes of tricks to good effect. But I found it very hard to give a damn about anyone or anything.
The plot is some waffle about a magic candle that once delivered a young woman called Alma and her three babies from scary chasey people on horseback in Colombia (though her husband was tragically killed). Said candle miraculously created a magic house with TARDIS-like rooms surrounded by mountains, thus a new home was born for Alma (voiced by María Cecilia Botero). In subsequent generations, her family grew, and each was bestowed with a magical gift by the house.
Now a grandmother and stern matriarch, Abuela Alma finds herself at odds with her granddaughter Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz), who inexplicably didn’t get a gift at the point she came of age for the house to bestow one. Mirabel is therefore seen as a bit of an outsider and always in the way. When she sees visions of cracks in the house and the magic failing, everyone else, especially Abuela Alma, seems determined to remain in denial. Could the mysterious Bruno (John Leguizamo) — a family member mysteriously absent for somehow going off the magical rails — hold the answers?
To be fair, there are a couple of moderately enjoyable moments in the ensuing drama. An Indiana Jones-style cave/tunnel escapade scene, for instance, and a nice subplot of sibling rivalry between Mirabel and her Insta-perfect sister Isabella (Diane Guerrero), which has a fun resolution. The music (by Germaine Franco and Lin-Manuel Miranda) is agreeably bouncy, and one number involving another of Mirabel’s other sisters who has super-strength is an enjoyably surreal mix of donkeys, Greek myth, and other bizarre metaphors for taking on too much.
Yet despite all of this, there really is only so much everyone’s-special saccharine I can take before I lapse into a nauseous diabetic coma. I have no problem with sentimentality when done well, but here it feels incredibly forced, ladled on so the viewer feels bludgeoned into algorithmically dictated submission, via well-intended but unconvincing find-your-true-self waterboarding. Given that the film warns against tightly wound contrived perfectionism (in an inconsistent, powers-are-good-until-they’re-not sort of way), it seems oddly reluctant to take its own advice, aspiring to be nothing more than box-ticking machine-tooled production line content.
In short, I found Encanto an unsatisfying and rather forgettable tale. It might appeal to young children with very low expectations, but this is light years from top-flight Disney animation.
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