As seen in this delightful piece of fan fiction:
Reminds me of this one
and this one
Everything Einstein and Hawking say is not profound and everything Bruno says is not an official prophecy.
OK just watched this and I cannot get over the abuse of the donkeys. I love Luisa but she actually kicks one up in the air. She also throws them around a lot. Meanwhile they are being great back-up dancers. Look at them at the beginning of Surface Pressure. They see her get angry and they are all backing away. They know that they are about to be abused. I am surprised that nobody is sticking up for the poor donkeys.
#DonkeyLivesMatter
So I guess you won’t be buying any merchandise featuring her, like a donkey ho tee.
Just got around to watching this a couple days ago (yay, depression).
I feel like saying that the movie should have ended with the rest of the Madrigals not getting their gifts back rather misses the point.
The gifts are good (mostly¹). Two aspects of how people (mostly Abuela Alma²) people treat being gifted are bad - putting pressure on the people who have the gifts (Luisa, Isabela, and Pepa feel it worst³), and dismissing the ability of people who don’t have them (primarily Mirabel) to contribute.
And it’s also made clear that the magic came from love - it came to be in response to Abuelo Pedro sacrificing himself to protect his family and the rest of the village, and started going away when the unhealthy attitudes toward it start coming to a head, with Antonio’s ceremony and Isabela’s engagement. So having them not come back after those issues are resolved would be rather a kick in the balls of that theme.
¹ Bruno, Pepa, and Dolores seem to have gotten the short end of the stick…although, honestly, Dolores doesn’t seem to mind. I guess the fact that it makes it far easier for her to get gossip makes up for the annoyance from hearing everything.
² As mentioned by others, the only members of the family who treat Mirabel badly are Alma and Isabela, and the latter it’s mostly as a response to the pressure she gets from their abuela. And, while it’s clear that the village depend on the Madrigals’ gifts - particularly Luisa’s strength and Julieta’s healing - it doesn’t seem to be unhealthily so. They’re clearly capable of doing things for themselves - the village existed for 40 years before Luisa got her gift, and they’re perfectly able to rebuild Casita while she’s depowered - and don’t seem to realize they’re putting such pressure on Luisa, who puts on a good face until Mirabel manages to get her to unload. (Accidentally, because Luisa doesn’t even let the mask slip with her family.)
³ Luisa gets a song about it, Isabela’s response drives a big part of the plot, and Pepa gets a lot of scenes where she’s shown desperately trying to get things under control.
So the other people in the village just don’t love each another enough to have their own magic powers?
< grudging golf clap >
Regarding the subs and their service to the plot: the story is a mystery to be solved. The songs act as puzzle pieces. They’re presented as theatre-style showpieces, so I can understand some viewers being unfamiliar with such pacing. But the songs still service the story.
Yep. It’s a stated goal of Disney that the songs advance the story. They’ve been doing it since Tangled, I think. Off the top of my head, including Frozen, Frozen 2, Coco, Encanto. The song and the script writers work together early in the production. If you don’t listen to the lyrics, you will miss out on some of the story. (Sorry, don’t have a handy cite, based on several “making” specials.)
As I mentioned earlier, my problem with the lyrics was I couldn’t understand them. I had to back up, turn on the subs, and still occasionally pause it to catch up on reading. The problem with the lyrics wasthattheyweresanglikethis.
They’ve had “songs service and advance the plot” as an explicit development principle since Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin came on board for The Little Mermaid. That’s not to say earlier Disney musicals didn’t have such songs, and neither did every song since then do so perfectly.
We’ve been babysitting our 2 yr old granddaughter more regularly recently, and when weather has been bad, my wife used it as an excuse for her to watch some of the Disney movies issues since our kids were young. Maybe I hit my limit with repeated viewing of Little Mermaid and Lion King, but I’ve not made it through all of Tangled, Frozen 2, or Encanto.
But my one recollection was that Disney sure seems to be doubling down on the old=evil meme. Not sure if it leaps out at me now that I am more solidly in that demographic, but it just seems so constant - you see someone w/ grey hair and wrinkles, and you KNOW they are the bad guy.
Eh, when you have a movie about a kid/young adult, having an adult being the bad guy/foil is pretty easy to do. That being said, I wouldn’t say the most recent Disney movies follow that pattern. Frozen, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon, etc., none of them have “an old person” as a bad guy. The only fits that is Tangled which is over 10 years old.
Fair enough. Like I said, I have FAR FROM an encyclopedic knowledge of recent Disney toons. The last 2 I recall were Encanto and Tangled, where it wasn’t just AN adult, but the ONLY OLDER adult.
Next maybe we can discuss whether Disney still kills off enough moms? 
Does Wreck-It Ralph not count? King Kandy/Turbo definitely seems like an older adult in that world.
In Frozen, the Duke of Weselton is definitely a bad guy, if not the primary bad guy.
In Frozen 2, the bad guy (Elsa’s grandfather) is old as well.
Well, not in the sense of “this is a bad guy we have to defeat.” Really, the past few Disney have had no real antagonists in the traditional sense.
Encanto subverts this. Yes, Alma is the film’s antagonist, but she’s not villainous. The real “bad guy” is trauma: Alma was traumatized by her husband’s death, and all the subsequent conflicts – Pepa’s emotional dysregulation, Luisa’s fears of inadequacy, Isabela’s resentment at the expectations imposed on her – stem from Alma’s grief and trauma, and her inability to resolve them.
Which is what sets Mirabel apart from the rest of her family – she does face her trauma, she acknowledges her pain, she speaks the unspeakable. In her song she admits “I’m not fine” and says she “can’t keep down the unspoken invisible pain”. She sees the cracks in Casita, she goes behind the walls to face what’s hidden there, she talks about, and to, Bruno, the one “we don’t talk about”. She bares the wounds at the heart of the family, which is painful but necessary to heal. Bruno’s vision of her is exactly correct – she both reveals and repairs the family’s fractures; at the end, she’s the one who puts the house on a new foundation. That’s her gift, the courage to hurt and to heal.