There is definitely a process to go from A to B, and it is not nearly so quick. Really that would be weeks/ months.
But it is forgivable. Rebuilding the house can still symbolically work, as that is a process.
The song between Mirabel and Luisa is a much better exploration of that.
If these characters or situations weren’t special, we wouldn’t have movies about them. It’s the same reason why you have a movie about a guy who wins the lottery, instead of 50 million movies about people who didn’t win the lottery.
You can’t really pitch an animated movie about a dysfunctional family without providing some sort of hook to get asses in the seats. And more importantly, you tell a story about a family with magical powers as a way to draw people in, then you hit them with the human story about a dysfunctional family and how they deal with interpersonal issues. You use the fun fantastical story as a delivery method for the deep personal message.
Can we retire this justification? It’s a fantastical animated film. Fantasy stories aren’t just for kids. Animated films aren’t just for kids. Both of those may appeal to kids, but that doesn’t make it a “kid’s film”.
Encanto is a reference to the VIOLENCE that has been happening in Colombia for decades/centuries though right? The constant bloodshed that has occurred in its history? The idea of the candle is not just the miracles for the family, but the end of that violence, at least in that small town.
That rebuilding process wasn’t super short though, was it? At least a few weeks/months?
I’ve never heard the generation differences explained this way. Fantastic!
That’s my understanding of it. I found this article pretty illuminating.
The Violence, after all, stains almost every Colombian family. This focus on the country’s tensions happens in Colombian-made media too, as exemplified by the “narco-novelas” that clutter our networks. We have come to believe that this is all we get: an echo chamber of drugs, massacres, kidnappings, indifferent politicians, and a population that lacks memory, but still bears its baggage.
The Colombian Cultural Trust — a collection of consultants from a wide variety of fields, brought in to ensure the film’s authenticity — may have spoken to the writer-directors about this problem. Disney’s movie about our country couldn’t overtly include our violent past and present. But at some point, they decided not to ignore it, either. Disney’s Colombian movie centers on finding a place free of that innate suffering: a place its people can safely call home.
The happiness portrayed in Encanto isn’t just escapism, it’s defiance. It’s about challenging that notion that we Colombians have to be miserable forever.
After arguing throughout the whole movie about how to save the house and who’s to blame for its impending destruction, the Madrigals ultimately have to accept that their miracle wasn’t the magical house, or their magical gifts. In fact, the miracle is that after all these years, the family has somehow figured out how to thrive in the face of tragedy. The magic gave them their Casita , sure, but they were the ones to create love, beauty, and community in it. A broken history got them there, but it’s a miracle that they’re still there regardless. And at the end of the day, that’s worth a lot.
I think that Mirabel clearly has visions, as evidence by the fact that she had visions! And her telling Abuela about the vision may have accelerated the events of the movie somewhat, but I think it was implied that the family was slowly deteriorating in the first place. Mirabel got those visions (possibly from the house?) because she was the one uniquely positioned to fix everything in the first place.
(And I don’t think that Bruno taking off started the deterioration of the family; if anything, it was a result of deterioration of the family!)
Interpretation 1: She didn’t get a gift because she needed to be there to keep the family together. The house was smart enough to understand what the family needed, and it needed Mirabel to communicate and keep everyone grounded.
Interpretation 2: Mirabel’s gift is empathy, with a lot of the same justifications as above. But she doesn’t need her own room, because that would just make her feel special and set apart from everyone else. Having empathy requires her to be around everyone and talking to them (like the little kid in the nursery), not off in her own room.
Either interpretation works for me, but it’s definitely something that is left up to interpretation.
My dad came from a family where every kid was special because of something. One kid was good at math. Another was good at rifle shooting. Another was good at music. Growing up, it was made very clear to him that they were loved because of their special gifts, not just because of who they were. So it resonated with me that people should feel special because of who they are, not because of what they can do.
Bruno was sent away (or ran away) because he was tearing the family apart. If she told everyone that he was still there, it would just reopen all of those traumatic events again. As the family informant, she knows everything but has to keep secrets. Just another manifestation of family trauma!
I would say that Mirabel did get a gift, it was the same gift that her Abuela received: the (new) Casita itself.
However, she just didn’t receive it from her Grandmother’s house at the appointed time. This either because it wasn’t her time yet (the timing of the gifting ceremony is arbitrary), or the Casita somehow “knew” it needed to wait until after it collapsed and was rebuilt, or simply that it was a gift the old Casita couldn’t give, because it was a gift bestowed by the “new” Casita upon rebuilding. Any of those interpretations work for me. (IIRC, the doorknob recedes before she can touch it the first time around, so her gift still comes the first time she actually touches it, but I could be mistaken about that scene.)
Given that that’s my own interpretation, I struggle a little with people who present the story in the “its okay not to be special” terms. There’s an element of that, and that’s clearly the struggle Mirabel herself experiences (she even has 2 songs about it), but in its totality, it isn’t a story about not being special, really, just about being special in a different way. Or alternately, it is a story about how you everybody has value even if you personally don’t know what that value is.
It’s sort of a sleight of hand that reminds me of some of the contortions around the latter day princess movies, e.g. Princess and the Frog, where Teana is definitely not a princess…until at the end, she actually is.
I think I read that one, or at least one very similar to it. It’s a good read. Some of the stuff I knew bits and pieces of, but outside of a single reading of “100 Hundred Years of Solitude” the who culture is something that I realize I’m painfully ignorant of.
I think that the message is that everyone has value because of who they are, not because of some specific gift that they have.
I think that message might have been conveyed more effectively if they hadn’t given back everyone their powers at the end. Although if they hadn’t, I’d have felt pretty bad for the kid who could communicate with/control animals for like, what, a week? A day?
Also it leaves everyone with a power, except Mirabel. Again.
Yeah, my 12-year-old was pretty upset about that part, lol.
Just because you appreciate people for who they are, that doesn’t mean that people don’t also have talents and abilities. What kind of a lesson would that be?? “Okay everyone…Mirabel feels like she’s not special because she doesn’t have a power, so now no one gets a power! There, we’re all equal! Are you happy now, Mirabel!?”
Honestly, it’s like you didn’t even watch the movie.
This sounds like a teachable moment where you can explain that Mirabel is special because of who she is, and she doesn’t need a magic power to be special. I mean, I’m 75% sure your child doesn’t have a magic power, so that’s one way to relate to Mirabel.
Or in a pinch, you can just say that Mirabel’s power is empathy.
Exactly what I told her.
The movie itself refers to them as “gifts”, and that makes it easy to frame it as “Mirabel was given a gift, the thing most important thing to her in the world: her family.”
Shades of like, that one aunt who does all the planning and hosts everything and takes care of the grandparents.
Agreed. It would be a better and braver movie if the magic didn’t come back and the people in the family found their way back into their places and roles through their own effort and their reliance on other people in the family and the community both.
But hey, Disney. They know people would expect a “magical” ending, so they went with that one. Understandable, even if slightly disappointing.
Actually, some YouTubers have noted the absence of Candle after the house returns and gifts return, and make a good point that the source of the gifts originally was the candle, but after the house is rebuilt, the source of the gifts is now Mirabel.
Anyway, it’s something about the Butterflies on her dress being the same as the butterflies on the candles and being super symbolic.
I thought that could be the case because I didn’t see the candle in the final scenes, but oddly enough the candle is in the second part of Bruno’s vision (after the destruction of the house)? Maybe it’s an afterthought, but I appreciate the symbolism, even if it’s an afterthought.
The candle, if present in Bruno’s vision, could be symbolic (representing the magic, or simply as a symbol for the family being whole, since that’s what the candle represented to him).
You could also probably argue that the house itself, or the doorknob specifically are the totemic items that have significance to Mirabel, the way that the candle held meaning to her grandmother, and that the magic is simply possessed of a different form because it’s now Mirabel’s house, not Abuela’s and thus an extension of her will. I don’t care too much about that kind of close read though, as I don’t think that’s a detail that’s particularly significant to the story.
Bruno mentions that everything is out of order in his vision. He sees the house’s destruction, then the butterfly, then Isabela and Mirabel in front of the candle.