Encanto — Review Thread

Well, this was an absolute delight.  Enjoyed it immensely.

Enjoyed this one very much! Although it seemed a bit more geared for adults than children, I thought it was a refreshing change of pace from the usual Disney formula. Still, my two year old and four year old enjoyed the "house movie" and managed to make it through without creating a scene in the theater, although my youngest was getting a bit antsy near the end. The music was pretty good, some of the songs were very "Hamilton". Will probably catch it again when it premiers on Disney+ later this month.

8/10

Encanto(12/24/2021)
Disney+ seems to be establishing some sort of tradition of making a major animated movie available for free around Christmas day; last year it was Soul and this year it’s Encanto, which had been a theatrical release only for the last month. Encanto was very much trying to be the next big Disney thing along the lines of a Frozen or a Moana and while it’s done alright given pandemic box office it doesn’t quite seem to have captured the hearts of audiences and having finally seen the film I think I get why… this thing’s kind of messy. The movie is set in South America and focuses in on this wacky family in the mountains who have obtained magical powers through a candle that seems to have granted powers to everyone in the family except for one: out protagonist Mirabel. It’s kind of a wonky premise that doesn’t have the best “high concept” appeal, and the film tries to introduce it through a musical number that’s probably less effective at conveying the exposition than the filmmakers seem to think. In general I didn’t find the music here all that catchy even though they brought in the perhaps over-extended Lin-Manuel Miranda to write most of them. The family itself in the movie is perhaps a bit too big and it rather struggled to introduce all the people, explain how they were related to one another, and give each person a distinct personality while also exploring some of the dysfunctions inherent in the setup and also explaining all the convoluted rules of the magic goings on. On the more positive side, the animation is pretty vivid and colorful and the film has a cool setting to work with but however good the movie looked the fact of the matter is I wasn’t really able to get into this story at all pretty much from the get go. In general I think Disney maybe needs to take a step back and put a pause on trying to recreate Frozen over and over again, it’s been a good five years since they’ve given us something like Zootopia in place of these fantasy type things and if they’re not careful audiences are going to burn out on them like when they ran the “Disney Renaissance” into the ground in the late 90s.
** out of Five

Bruno is a good track, but the rest are trash. Was watching the original nightmare alley and there's a Bruno in that and I kept singing it when he popped on the screen.

It was true when I wrote it

The song they seemed to be banking on was "Dos Oruguitas," which is what they summited for the Oscar instead of "We Don't Talk About Bruno."  Not sure what they were smoking when they made that choice.

Wait a minute...



Okay, was there someone named Bruno working for Disney that the company wanted revenge on this year?

"A Whole New World" was released in an era where the hot 100 was judged solely by radio play and sales of physical singles, the two mediums it is the least likely to do well in.  Had it gotten points every time parents played it for their kids via streaming it probably would have done a lot better.