Here’s what I thought Encanto would be from the teaser and why I didn’t really feel like it was going to give me enough to see it: she’s a squib, her quirky family has powers, and it’s hard being the odd one out. Woe is me. When we were looking for movies to watch on vacation this past December, this was a big contender due to it being approximately 90 minutes long , which the only realistic film length for two people who are tethered to a kitchen timer that threatens to blow up a building if it doesn’t get fed.
Here’s why we ended up seeing it: Wife said that she had listened to an ICYMI about the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” Friends had mentioned that it had some earworms and were obsessing over it. While we had burgers together at his house, Friend mentioned that the entire movie could’ve been a play, since it all takes place in the house, and now after coming out of this movie, I really hope that someone adapts this into a play with some mean practical effects.
So I had a high profile endorsement. I knew that John Leguizamo was Bruno and that Alan Tudyk played a wordless parrot for some kind of superstitious reason about animated movies. And I knew that there was a banger, because I had listened to it in the tub with the tiny terrorist that lives under my roof the other night.
Mostly this feels like a rehash of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Kiki’s Delivery Service is a triggering movie for me, possibly the worst Studio Ghibli movie ever conceived–and that’s coming from someone who has seen both The Red Turtle and Ponyo. For those of you not aware of the plot to KDS, it’s about a young woman, Kiki, who, upon inheriting the powers of witchcraft and wizardry, decides to run a delivery service. She doesn’t go and help people or appreciably improve the world. She runs a fucking business and she’s not actually that successful given her supernatural powers. Anyway, at some point she loses her powers and the winter sequence of this movie involves her… having to do her fucking job like everyone else? Because it’s so hard to be us? The movie seems to be about a twenty-something burnout without a lot of ambition or skills to improve her situation, which I think is probably pretty similar to the assessment of Mirabel Madrigal.
There is a lot of Wakefield (2016) meets Parasite energy in this movie. Wife reminded me that Bruno’s living in the walls is also a send up to Jane Eyre, which makes me think we didn’t have to dig that deep for that wholly fucked up plot to write itself.
The Moment of Trauma is actually something that we’ve seen almost entirely before in an earlier flashback (although Wife says it was “new to Mirabel,” so I guess we’re processing Generational Trauma?). It doesn’t have the same impact when we’ve already basically seen the Big Reveal. (There was an article by Parul Sehgal about this that Emily Bazelon chatted about a few weeks ago called The Case Against the Trauma Plot, which I read today and it helped shape some of my meh feelings about the movie.)
Hey, should also say the abuela really got easy from her family after a) disowning her only son, b) pressuring one of her granddaughters to marry a man she doesn’t love, and c) denying another granddaughter her power. And in terms of the ending, there aren’t a lot of good options open to the film, since you really have three options: a Shrek ending where everything stays fucked because it’s better to be yourself, warts and all; the Corpse Bride ending, where you marry the alive girl because your… dead bride doesn’t mind being cucked?; and the ending they ultimately went with. I have to conclude that Mirabel doesn’t have the capacity to receive a power beyond “Middle Child” because she has no actual interests, which appears to have been an important requirement for receiving powers in the first place, besides the love of your grandma. At the same time, it really did seem like she was going to inherit the power of Imagining Bad Things Happening in the Future based on her “visions” of the “future” on her little brother’s christening, but apparently that’s just Bruno’s thing. Also, holy shit at one point was Bruno’s bedroom in the same part of the house as everyone else’s? It looks like in one of the flashback scenes that when he’s younger his door is on the same floor as his siblings but then he is forced to build a tower for himself which is just full of sand and steep steps?
This movie is confusing, not because it’s hard to follow but because it’s been made a couple times before and it lacks stakes for everyone involved. Really, the person who should’ve been sweating bullets the most is abuela and she seems to have played a trauma card very early in order to exculpate herself from any responsibility for her present actions.
