Encanto: Beautiful But Shallow

Animation is a unique storytelling medium. On top of the usual parameters that a movie is judged by, there is the nagging question over whether or not the film uses the medium to its fullest potential. This is because animation creates a unique opportunity to create worlds, visuals and all-around spectacle that cannot be created in live action movies. As films approach the singularity point where reality as shown on film can create more and more extravagant imagery, it is incumbent on animated films to prove to the audience that they are doing something that cannot be done in other mediums. Encanto does this very well, taking full advantage of the medium to create a musical adventure that could not have been done in live action.

Visually, the movie is beautiful and takes full advantage of everything that animation in its current form can do. Small things that are taken for granted like rendering of sand and water are used to great effect. The movie also features a seamless blend of multiple forms of visible magic into the world including weather effects, ghostly and other ethereal effects, growing and expanding plants and general mystic magic. These things are mixed into an already rich and beautiful world full of color that creates a truly interesting visual experience.

The hiccups that this movie have come in the form of a fairly cliché plot. It is all too common for a movie to take a character on a journey where they are learning about their family, along that journey have to deal with borderline abusive or negligent members of the family, and by the end have all of the negativity brushed away because there was an explanation as to why the person was negligent or abusive up until that point. This is only highlighted by the short before it (Far from the Tree) being a story about how someone breaks the cycle of abuse by acknowledging that it happened and then not inflicting the same pain on their child.

This movie features characters who are overtly abusive to their family, not just to the protagonist Maribel but notably to another character Bruno. It seems dismissive to sum up the problem the way they do in this movie without acknowledging the decades of poor treatment of this one character. It is similar to the resolution of Ghostbusters: Afterlife in that regard where the pain of Egon leaving his daughter damaged her visibly over the course of the movie and at the end of the movie it is dismissed because what he was doing was for the greater good. The emotional damage is real for these characters though and to dismiss them feels like a disservice to their arc because they are not given the time to process what happened to them and are sort of railroaded into a response that is fitting to resolve the overriding plot.

At an hour and forty minutes, this movie is a great distraction because, despite nitpicking, the movie is captivating, and the music is fantastic as well. It does manage to tell a cohesive story that will keep audiences of all ages entertained for its duration. It is unlikely to reach the levels audience permeance of say Frozen (and to a lesser extent Moana) but for what it is, this movie does well.

Rating: 8/10