Disney Panders to Latinos with a Woeful Effort

D isney’s Encanto is so shoddily engineered that I picture marketing executives sitting around telling one another, “Meh, it’s for the Latino market. It doesn’t have to be that good.”

And so it isn’t. A thin story, dull characters, endlessly regurgitated gags, and a general air of pointlessness dog this fantasy about life in an enchanted house in an unspecified Latin country (said to be Colombia in publicity materials). Billed as the 60th feature from Disney Animation Studios, this is bottom-of-the barrel stuff from the Mouse House. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who contributes a slate of thuddingly mediocre songs, is now nearly seven years past the triumphant premiere of Hamilton (more time than passed between A Hard Day’s Night and Let It Be), and his career is drifting further and further off track.

Mirabel (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) is a tweener and the sole member of the Madrigal family not to be blessed with a magical power. She tries to be upbeat about her fabulous relatives but understandably feels left out as they prance around showing off their magic tricks. What did she do to deserve being relegated to second-class status? Nothing, as it turns out.

In effect, la familia Madrigal are royals who have been blessed with a completely unearned privilege thanks to a magical candle that intervened to save the life of the matriarch Abuela Alma (Maria Cecilia Botero) two generations back. Unlike other Disney royal families, though, this one seems to have no sense of noblesse oblige, and the Madrigals spend their days partying and goofing off, which doesn’t endear them to the audience much.

So you’re unlikely to care when things start to come apart. Mirabel discovers that the magical house in which everyone lives is cracking, symbolizing a possible end to the family’s magical era, but that brings up a major script problem. What exactly are the stakes here? This family of spoiled layabouts might lose their magic and have to live like the rest of us? Yawn. They didn’t do anything either to merit or to show gratitude for what they have.

Moreover, the magical powers themselves are little more than fodder for dull visual jokes that keep getting repeated with slight variations throughout the movie: One character has amazing hearing, another is a shape-shifter. Another just mopes around beneath a rain cloud all day, suggesting her gift is low serotonin levels. Mirabel’s linebacker-sized sister Luisa (Jessica Darrow) enjoys awesome strength, but she mainly uses it to move furniture, and also to carry donkeys around. (Why would anyone carry donkeys?) Another sister, Isabella (Diane Guerrero), is a great beauty who can conjure mountains of pretty flowers out of the air and is a bit vain and annoying in the Instagram/TikTok way.

The movie gets stuck for a good long while marveling at all of these characters while Mirabel tries not to be sad about being left out, and it badly needs some forward movement that never really happens. Instead, it keeps pausing for clunky production numbers that explode with scene changes and dance moves but don’t advance the plot. For instance, a confessional by Luisa is about how, despite being famously strong, she’s actually deeply neurotic and fearful, and this unattractive character sings it unpleasantly.

At least Mirabel goes on a hero’s quest to find herself? Not really. Instead, she spends the entire movie hanging around the house. Clues about what’s ailing the beloved casita fall into her lap without her doing anything particularly special to discover them. While remaining on the enchanted property, she manages to leap across a chasm or two, but these are phony little nuggets of manufactured adventure, and there’s never any sense that she’s really in danger.

The key to the mystery lies chiefly with the family’s pariah uncle Bruno (John Leguizamo), who became an outcast when his prophecies of bad news started coming true. And, hey, he’s wacky! Check out how wacky he is! Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard, co-directed by Castro Smith, and written by all of the above plus three more writers with story credits, the movie is equally awful whether it’s trying to be funny or exciting or mysterious or cute. And where’s it all leading? The final act amounts to an injunction to everyone to hug it out. That’s it? That’s it. Disney’s worst movies are sometimes derided as mere thrill rides. There’s no danger of anyone saying that about this one.