Encanto

Byron Howard, with Jared Bush and Charise Castro Smith, made a rare animated feature where the research stays legible on screen. The team spent two weeks in Colombia in 2018, taking in Bogotá and Cartagena alongside smaller places such as Salento and Barichara. Disney assembled an advisory circle called the Colombian Cultural Trust; the journalist Alejandra Espinosa Uribe from Barichara fed into Mirabel’s design, and the botanist Felipe Zapata kept the plants accurate, wax palm included. Disney Animation also kept choreographers attached from beginning to end for the first time. Jamal Sims and Kai Martinez gave each character a separate movement vocabulary, reggaeton for Luisa, Cali salsa for Mirabel. Martinez, who is Colombian, spent five months with the animators getting every move onto the beat. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the eight songs in Spanish and English in parallel, which means watching a dub changes what information reaches you. The boldest narrative call is erasing the antagonist entirely. With no enemy to beat, the climax is a conversation rather than a fight, and the house comes down as a consequence of that conversation rather than an attack. Right for a viewer content to have the resolution arrive because somebody changes their mind. Wrong for anyone unforgiving about a crowded household introduced in a rush, where several relatives get a single scene each.