ANI-MOVIES, *Encanto

Getting the Best Animated Feature Oscar, Encanto is a modern fairy tale with a more diversified cast and focuses on an entire family that is totally against formula considering this is a Disney movie. They made a point of making this production a musical which is something Disney usually only gives various segments of their movies to, which Lin-Manuel Miranda and Germaine Franco did an amazing job on. Byron Howard and Jared Bush directed this CGI animated flick that was not backed up by Pixar, and fully committed to making the surroundings itself as a genuine character on its own.

Taking place in Columbia, an unseen group of soldiers infiltrate a small village and chase the surviving couple Pedro and Alma with their newborn triplets. Pedro sacrifices himself to let the rest of his family get away, although Alma is fortunate enough to have a magic candle that conjures up a living house named Casita which can usually repair itself and tends to provide its inhabitants with whatever they provisionally need at the time. The house takes in other castaways and seals them off in a separate realm in the mountains called Encanto. Decades later, the town has flourished with each of the Alma's children and grandchildren getting their own unique super power like strength, enhanced hearing, making flowers grow, shapeshifting, or baking goods that heal people. Even her youngest grandson gains the ability to talk to animals, and each of the family's rooms have their own separate dimension where its bigger on the inside. The only one in the family who doesn't seem to have gotten a magical talent was Mirabel, even though she seems to be more attuned to the Castia's attempts to communicate, although the house has a serious problem clueing anyone in on its latest dilemma as the magic appears to be fading. Mirabel tries to inform her grandmother about the impending doom, but she stubbornly refuses to listen, an attitude that drove off her clairvoyant son Bruno who it turns out has been living inside Castia's cracks with a posse of rats. Mirabel finds out some of her family is not satisfied with the roles their powers have tied them to mostly using them to help out the citizens of the town, so the understanding teen attempts to get her uncle Bruno to do another vision of the house's fate. All signs point to Mirabel making peace with her bratty older sister who has chlorokinesis, even though this act caused the house to crumble faster after Alma disapproves of Mirabel's efforts. The house eventually crumbles and the family all lose their super powers. It all gets salvaged when Bruno reappears from his self-imposed exile and the villagers help rebuild Casita which restores everyone's powers. It might have been a bit more interesting if in the finale the house didn't regain its magic and just stood as a regular home with a normal family trying to adjust to their lives as regular people.

Encanto works as primarily as a musical, as the plot suffers from shifting from one member of the family to another leaving some of them completely out of the story with no real character depth. The magical elements leave an entire textbook's worth of lore left unexplained, like if Casita is alive and knows it's in trouble why it doesn't just tell Mirabel or anyone else of what the problem is. There have been spurious attempts by viewers to determine whether or not Mirabel actually had a magical gift of her own, like displaying comprehension as its own special attribute, but no clear answer has given. There's letting the concept of an enchanted world operate under its own laws of nature, however having the physics of a magical backdrop a complete mystery is for an uncertain way of how it's supposed to be interpreted. This would work well as a stage musical, but the movie's consistency at adding yet another plot complication doesn't make for a clear picture.