“Encanto” is Disney’s latest animated miracle, a vibrantly colored musical fantasia (featuring new songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda) about a very special family in Colombia blessed with magical gifts. It both speaks to themes persistent in the Disney Animation canon (how goodness trumps any external superpower and the importance of family) with a more modern magical realist sensibility that eschews the familiar for the unexpected (our lead character, Mirabel, doesn’t go on a quest or even leave the house). It’s enough to make you wonder where this wild concept came from.
Fortunately, directors Jared Bush, Byron Howard, and Charise Castro Smith sat down with us, who shared their insights. “Encanto”It was born.
“Five years ago this week, we started talking about this movie crazily. It all just goes by in a blink of an eye, but Jared had come off of ‘Moana’ with Lin-Manuel Miranda. Jared and I had worked on ‘Zootopia’ of course, together, we love working together and we wanted to do a musical. We just knew it’s time,” Howard explained. Howard said Miranda was interested in doing it. “a definitive Latin American Disney musical.” While they didn’t know Where it would be set initially, Howard, Bush and Miranda knew that it would be centered around an extended family – something that all three of them had in common.
“All of these signs started pointing toward Columbia, the sort of crossroads of Latin America, where everything kind of comes together, culture, ethnicity, music, food,” Howard explained. “It just seemed the place to go, and that’s what pointed us there in the first place. So that’s the early genesis, but it just happened so long ago, but it just, it came together very quickly.”
Mirabel (voiced by the wonderful Stephanie Beatriz) is the only family member in the Madrigal brood who isn’t given a magical gift (one of her sisters can communicate with plants, the other has super-strength). The magic part of “Encanto” came later. They all came to an agreement on the concept of extended family. The next step was to define who these family members were.
“We got excited about the family archetypes early on,”Bush stated. “Like the left out one or the golden child or the one who bears all the responsibility or the mom who heals with her food. But we talked about it actually purely on in sort of reality-based. We didn’t get to magic right away.”
Bush said that Castro Smith was his inspiration during the development of the project. “The movie has to work if this family has no magic.”Instead, the filmmakers remained focused on “family dynamics that hopefully we can all relate to.”
This was their principal who guided them through every stage of production. “Encanto.”
“Several times over the course of making the movie, we would do a hard stop look at it and ask, ‘If there’s no magic, do these pieces add up correctly?’ and then go back in,”Bush stated.
Bush says that the magic helped the filmmakers answer another question. “Why is this movie animated?”
“The idea of bringing in these gifts, telling the story inspired by magical realism, allowed it to elevate, allowed us to do something visually that only animation could do,”Bush stated. “And that was the really exciting plus part. But that foundation in true family dynamics was the most important thing.”
Castro Smith, an actor, playwright, and writer, was another key element in bringing the family together. “The Exorcist” “The Haunting of Hill House”), who was new to the oversized world of animation. She was approached by Byron three years ago. Byron later revealed that he was especially enamored of her play. “Feathers and Teeth,”After spending a few years working on the movie, he discovered that a bunch of creepy creatures lived under the floorboards in a family home. Casto Smith says that Bush and Howard approached her with a simple pitch. “We’re making the first Disney, Latinx musical about like an awkward 14-year-old girl with no magical superpowers.”
“And I was like, ‘Well, having been an awkward 14-year-old girl with no superpowers, I think I’m on board,’”Castro Smith spoke.
At first, she was a writer, helping to develop the basic concept. After a year, they asked her to become a co-director.
“I think when I joined, Jared and I did a lot of work on the characters and really just delving into the story and then going through the whole Disney development process of writing the screenplay 1700 times,”Castro Smith spoke.
Howard intervened at this point, stating that Castro Smith was being investigated, just like any other rambunctious family. “too humble.”
“When she came in, she created the foundation, this backstory of Abuela Alma, that the entire movie sits on,”Howard said, beaming. “The idea of displaced people, the idea that Abuela Alma lost her husband and that’s underneath this whole thing. She always leaves that part out — that the most fundamental important thing in the entire movie is what she created. And that really set the tone for the entire thing. So that’s what she did.” Okay then!.
Castro Smith also contributed to a crucial area of the movie, the musical numbers. Bush admitted that it was arguably the most challenging aspect of the film’s production.
“We’ve never attempted choreography on this scale before,”Bush stated.
They were particularly difficult because of how closely they were tied to each of their 12 main characters. When they moved, the characters were communicating themselves as if they were reading a page of dialogue. They decided to add choreography after seeing initial choreography tests by Kai Martinez and Jamal Sims, both talented choreographers. The complexity increased. Castro Smith was also involved in the filmmaking process, bringing Miranda’s songs to life and making them into films that are Disney classics.
“From the beginning, Lin-Manuel really had some great instincts in terms of ensemble numbers. He really wanted to make a big set piece in the middle of the movie, which turned into ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno,’ which is so much fun and I love that it has like, the entire family together,”Castro Smith spoke. “And then ‘All of You.’ our final number the way that he’s able to just blend all of the different melodies of all of the different characters and put this whole puzzle together.”A word of caution: you will probably sob through many numbers. Your mask will help to conceal some of the tears.