Encanto Review

Disney's Colombian house-as-family film is the studio's best-looking musical in years and easily its most crowded. The Madrigals live in a casita that grants each child a gift, except Mirabel, and the real subject is not magic at all but the pressure a family puts on the children who carry it. Bruno, Luisa and Isabela each get a song that works as a diagnosis, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's score does more character work than the dialogue does; the number about being the strong one is the most honest thing a Disney film has said in a decade.

The animation of hair, embroidery and light through a courtyard is genuinely beautiful, and the casita is performed as a character with nothing but tiles and shutters to act with. The problem is arithmetic: eleven family members, ninety odd minutes, and several arcs that resolve inside a single verse. The final reconciliation arrives before anybody has done the work the songs describe. Still, this is a musical about inherited trauma that small children rewatch voluntarily, and the Bruno number earned its year of ubiquity.