Agreed. I'm repeatedly shocked as I hear adults report they loved this movie.
Of course my daughter is watching it over and over, and the songs are playing constantly. The music is fine, I'm a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan but I don't think this is his best work.
But the movie?!? There's no growth in any character, even the catharsis with the grandmother is "look how much I suffered, have sympathy that I ended up a tyrant". It's just eye/ear candy, fine for kids.
I genuinely don't get it, there are tons of relatively recent Pixar and Disney movies that I think are just better in all respects.
I don't mind a lack of character growth. I am extremely over the cliche Hollywood screenplay formula of:
1. Protagonist has problem and character flaw.
2. Tries to solve problem without fixing character flaw.
3. Solution blows up.
4. With help from friend, protagonist realizes flaw and fixes it.
5. Now able to solve problem.
But with Encanto, I really disliked how the plot undermined its own theme. The movie sets up an important moral statement that Mirabel doesn't need to be magically special to be valuable and valued. She can have worth because of who she is as a person. Then it throws that out at the climax by giving her some magic anyway because fuck it.
I have to say that the positive vibe and the Colombian village cliché are very entertaining in a time of emotional darkness (COVID, crisis, inflation, monopolies, etc). They just cheer us adults up.
IMHO it is an eye candy for everyone, not only kids. I mean there is a reason why romantic comedies just work telling the same kind of stories all over again with different actors.
I did appreciate that it was an hour and a half of good vibes and pretty pictures, though it felt a little try-hard to me.
> I mean there is a reason why romantic comedies just work telling the same kind of stories all over again with different actors.
As someone who loves romantic comedies, I don't think of them as the "same kinds of stories" any more than I think of my ex-girlfriends as the same experience even though they were all romantic relationships that ended.
Would you think of a travel documentary to Brazil and one to Spain to be the same because they are both travel docs with similar structures? Probably not, because the details of the place itself are what the doc is about and those differ. With romantic movies, it's about the details of the character's individual psychologies that make the movie.
Of course my daughter is watching it over and over, and the songs are playing constantly. The music is fine, I'm a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan but I don't think this is his best work.
But the movie?!? There's no growth in any character, even the catharsis with the grandmother is "look how much I suffered, have sympathy that I ended up a tyrant". It's just eye/ear candy, fine for kids.
I genuinely don't get it, there are tons of relatively recent Pixar and Disney movies that I think are just better in all respects.