Encanto

Disney's 60th animated feature tells the tale of a magical family living in an enchanted area of Colombia created when a young married couple was forced to flee an armed conflict. The matriarch of the now fifty-year-old community, Alma Madrigal, prepares each child born of her liniage for the gift of a unique superpower, received on their eighteenth birthday, to be used for the benefit of the collective. The protagonist, Alma's 15-year-old granddaughter Mirabel, is the only offspring of the family not to have been granted this mystical birthright. No one knows why Mirabel didn't receive a gift, and she's considered a bit of an awkward outcast, but she is still loved by her family and the community. Mirabel carries on with positivity and joy in the grand tradition of Disney heroines who make the best of a raw deal. But when Mirabel discovers that the magic which holds the Encanto together is in danger, it's up to her to save the community and its traditions. 
  
Encanto suffers from the breakneck pacing and high-octane visuals indicative of most contemporary kids' movies. Everything moves so fast there's barely time to tell a coherent story; relying heavily on Mirabel's expository narration (some sung, some spoken, and some awkwardly written into exchanges with younger kids in the village) to set up the dozens of characters and establish the complex history and customs of the setting. And there are so many characters that, aside from Mirabel and Alma, everyone we meet amounts to little more than their superpower or their role in the family—the strong sister, the beautiful sister, the shapeshifting troublemaker, the nice mom, the supportive dad, etc etc. The ADHD approach to the visuals and storytelling results in a dichotomy of incredibly rich three-dimensional animation populated with incredibly flat one-dimensional characterizations. Even Mirabel's vilified uncle Bruno, whom she must rescue from banishment in order to restore order, turns out to be much less than the songs and stories about him lead us to believe.  

Animated films take years to develop and produce and sometimes all the revising results in a story that feels almost too perfectly engineered. And sometimes all that work results in a movie like Encanto, where the blending of themes, ideas, characters, and set-pieces doesn't fully come together. However, there is so much to enjoy in Encanto that the narrative frustrations take a back seat. Director Jared Bush (writer of the wonderful Moana and the serviceable Zootopia) keeps us from thinking too much about the defects in the script he and his five screenwriting collaborators concocted by dazzling us with colorful visuals, providing genuine laughs, and luxuriating in instantly catchy songs. Disney's latest resident tunesmith Lin-Manuel Miranda, seems more at home in this role than anyone since the team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Not all eight of the songs Miranda composes are earworms on the level of Kristen & Robert Lopez's "Let it Go," but whenever a character is singing in this movie all is right with the world.

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