Byron Howard e Jared Bush
Encanto

These days of holidays and closed schools, at Boom house, a lot of animated movies are being watched.
Over the last week, they have been practically watching only “Encanto,” which is Disney – Pixar’s big movie of 2021.

Technically, there isn’t much to say. If only because everything has already been said, and if it hasn't been said, you can easily imagine it.
The film is a spectacle for the eyes. On many occasions, it nearly reaches saturation with "stuff" on screen, details, colors. The animations and body movements, especially of the female clothing, verge on the incredible. It's a pity that, instead, the character design of the faces is particularly captivating and that even the secondary characters and some extras seem to leap out from last decade's animation.

The soundtrack and songs would warrant a lengthy discussion.
In general, I hate the Italian adaptations of Disney songs. It’s not the translators' fault: I understand that it can be a real headache to coordinate text, acting, animation, plot, etc., etc. Indeed, probably what is heard may truly be the best possible result. But some forced constructions of the verses and some lexical choices have been grating on me since I was a kid. Like: I discovered some time ago that “Let it go” from Frozen had more plays than a Gigi Finizio album in an episode of Il Boss delle Cerimonie and that the Italian version is highly appreciated. I hate that one too.
The adaptations of “Encanto” are no exception. Only that, one way or another, they can't stop humming “We Don't Talk About Bruno” all day long, and I've decided that my goal for 2023 is to memorize the lyrics of “The Family Madrigal.”

But why am I spending all these words on a Disney animated film?

Truthfully because it's the only film I've seen in the past three months.
Also because it's January 03, and I'm at the office and don't want to do anything.
But above all because, come to think of it, all the characters of “Encanto” are really messed up in the head.

There’s Mirabel, the protagonist, who is 15 and is the only family member without any "talent." She's learned to put a brave face on the mean jokes from the neighbors and the barely-concealed sadism with which her relatives never miss the chance to remind her of being the only normal one in a family of specials, yet she hates her sister and is daily mortified by her maternal grandmother.
There’s, indeed, the matriarch, Alma “Abuela” Madrigal: selfish, despotic, and willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to maintain the status quo. There’s Isabela, who has always lived with the obsession of beauty and perfection. There’s Luisa, physically very strong, but fragile in nature. Dolores, who is secretly in love with a man who doesn't even know she exists. There’s Bruno, the outcast, who has lived for years in solitude, among the mice, unable to move away from the same family that excluded him and a victim of split personality. There are also two men, without powers, who, obviously, don’t matter and don’t object, and who, perhaps out of love or ineptitude, have immediately surrendered to the idea of having no significant weight in the Madrigal's matriarchal dynamics.
In general, all the characters find themselves trapped in a flat caricature imposed on them since a young age by life, fate, or the family, from which they can’t rebel or from which they don’t have the courage to break free. The cursed old hag keeps everyone under her thumb: no one dares to contradict her, everyone lives in fear of not living up to her expectations or the role that’s been sewn on them by the special talent they were cursed with.

Damn, I would have liked to see this stuff in the hands of someone like Aronofsky, Haneke or one of those directors obsessed with unresolved family dramas that end with knives in the belly and kneecaps crushed with baseball bats.
I imagine tensions restrained for years with clenched jaws, veins throbbing on the forehead, the growing paranoia, the trivial event that at some point makes everything go haywire, the resulting domestic massacre, and the grand finale with the old lady’s head stuck on a pike and the camera fixed while a satisfied grin spreads across the protagonist’s bloody face...

Instead, I have to endure a somewhat fragile plot, but above all a cloying ending in its being overly conciliatory, unnecessarily ensemble, and that, on closer inspection, resolves little to nothing.
But for the kids, it's a blast.