On 24 October 2022, I watched the Disney animated musical Encanto (officially this studio's 60th animated feature, discounting collaborations, Pixars, etc), and it certainly lived up to its title – thoroughly enchanting!
Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard, and released in 2021 by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Encanto is all about a community inhabiting an enchanted Colombian town, Encanto, having been saved from attackers 50 years ago by a miraculous candle that continues to burn there and emanate magic.
Every member of Encanto's founder family, the Madrigals, has a magical gift (talking to animals, shape-shifting, sprouting flowers everywhere, immense physical strength, incredibly sharp hearing, etc), and even their house is sentient. But then along comes Mirabel Madrigal (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz), their loveable, goofy, always-ready-to-help teenage daughter, who turns out to everyone's great surprise to be seemingly bereft of magic.
Added to that is the frightening realisation that their house is beginning to crack up – literally! – their magic is failing inexplicably, and even the light from the miraculous candle is flickering. And then there is denigrated Uncle Bruno (John Leguizamo) – "We don't talk about Bruno", to quote the title of this movie's worldwide smash hit song (click here to view its official music video on YouTube) – who is shunned by the rest of the Madrigal family and the community for his disturbing visions of the future.
But can Bruno the outcast and Mirabel the unmagical successfully pool what abilities they do possess in order to discover why the magic is waning and save their realm from destruction?
Along the way there are some superb songs by Hamilton composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, a rich diversity of zoogeographically-correct animals accurately depicted, and not so much a feast as a full-blown fiesta for the eyes. If I had to describe Encanto in a single word, that word would unquestionably be 'colourful'. Wow, is it COLOURFUL!!!!
Hues and tints and shades of every possible wavelength, plus a fair few impossible ones too, I wager, hit the screen in a polychromatic explosion – a vibrant palette of unimaginable, spellbinding beauty, ranging from pastel to psychedelic and beyond any spectrum of visible light known to science!! Absolutely dazzling but in a good way, the way that all animated movies should be, if only they would stop lazily apeing live-action and go off instead in dramatic, unrestrained directions that only animation can attain, and which is surely therefore the whole purpose of animated productions anyway.
Staying with the subject of colour: in a particularly memorable scene near the end of the film, Mirabel and her grandmother Alma are standing in a multicoloured river. When I watched that scene, I assumed that this was merely a magical way of portraying it, but I later learned that there really is a multicoloured river in Colombia. Named the Caño Cristales, and commonly dubbed the Liquid Rainbow, during a brief spell between the wet and dry seasons it exhibits a multitude of hues, including bright yellow and green from its sand, and blue from its water, but especially brilliant reds, these latter deriving from Macarenia clavigera, a colourful species of riverweed present on the riverbed. Interestingly, the Caño Cristales's very existence was only made known as recently as 1969, when some cattle farmers chanced upon it, and it is officially protected from disturbance, with only a limited number of sightseers being permitted to visit this beautiful river in a year.
My one and only quibble with Encanto is that, perhaps being a Brit, I had trouble understanding some of the predominantly Latin American heritage voice cast here and there, but otherwise I totally loved this film! Indeed, along with Strange World (reviewed by me here) and Luca, Encanto is one of my favourite modern-day Disney animated movies. And guess what, none of these is a live-action/CGI remake of one of its earlier classic animated films. There's something to be said for originality over facsimile.
Moreover, in March 2022 Encanto won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of 2021, beating not only two fellow Disney movies, Raya and the Last Dragon (reviewed by me here) and Luca, but also The Mitchells Vs The Machines (reviewed by me here) and Flee, as well as winning a BAFTA that same year for Best Animated Film, plus a raft of more than 40 other awards too.
If you have a pair of sunglasses to hand in order to shield your eyes from the glare, be sure to click here to watch a thrilling, rainbow-resplendent official trailer for Encanto on YouTube.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment