Encanto and the Fragility of Tradition

Disney’s minor, messy masterpiece

According to their critics, Disney animated films have lost their way these last couple of decades. Compared to the golden age of Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid, today’s crop of Wish and Strange World come and go without the slightest blip on the cultural radar. If Disney animated films do break out today, it is usually thanks to their songs rather than their artistic merits.

The purported causes for this waywardness are legion: Disney is too woke, too skeptical of romance, too fixated on modern social concerns, too disconnected from fairy tales. Instead of love stories and political intrigue, we get angsty coming-of-age stories and domestic melodramas. Villains have been replaced with anxiety, and in lieu of “Kiss the Girl,” we get Frozen chastising viewers for believing in love at first sight.

But abandoning the well-worn path also allows you to forge fresh trails, and what Disney has lost by setting aside its classic formula, it’s gained from discovering unexplored ideas in unexpected places.

Here I am thinking of the film Encanto, which is the most thematically rich film Disney has produced since Beauty and the Beast, and the film from the last 10 years that has the best chance of being remembered decades from now.

Most Disney films are animated [no pun intended] by the spirit of individualism: the only thing holding our hero back is the pressures and obligations of filial piety and political duty. Encantohas plenty of that, with a heavy emphasis on mental self-care and the evils of conformity. But it is also attuned to a different set of concerns, ones that kids movies do not often broach: how challenging it is to maintain a tradition across generations, how familial identity can be simultaneously meaningful and burdensome, and how the ties that bind us are often formed in moments of trauma and sorrow.

To explore all this, we might boil the ideas of Encanto down to a single question: is tradition a finite or a renewable resource?

It might be strange to call “tradition” a “resource” in the first place, but in the film, it almost literally is. The opening sequence shows a young Mirabel learning from Abuela about the “encanto,” a miracle that has graced the family ever since Pedro, Abuela’s husband and Mirabel’s grandfather, died protecting the family from marauders. That magical power that has in turn given each family a unique power: Mirabel’s mother can heal people with her cooking, Louisa is super strong, Isabel can produce flowers on command. The family deploy these gifts on the villagers nearby, who honor and support them in return. Beyond these immediate gifts,the encanto also infuses their casa with magic, creating a sanctuary that shelters them from potential evils beyond. Each child receives their particular gift when they are about 6 years old in a special ceremony: the family welcomes the village inside their home, the child is presented to Abuela, and an enchanted door appears that leads into a magical room suited to the child’s new-found powers.

Mirabel, however, breaks the pattern. She approaches her door, ready to receive her gift, when her door inexplicably dissolves. And as painful as that moment is to Mirabel, it is even more terrifying to Abuela, for it raises an almost unthinkable possibility: that the encanto is dying off, that this magical force that had sustained, defined, and protected the family for so long, powered by her late husband’s sacrifice, might be losing its potency. And while the next child, Antonio, receives his gift, suggesting everything is back to normal, Mirabel receives at his ceremony a much more ominous power: she is given a vision of the encanto’s fading influence, of the candle going out, and of the casa breaking apart. She is now not only a sign of the encanto’s fragility but also a prophet of its future doom.

For most of the family members, Mirabel’s warning is a terrible shock, but to Abuela, it is much worse. To her, the loss of the encanto is about more than just losing their distinctive family identity or their pride of place in the community. To lose their magical identity is to expose themselves to the evil of the outside world—evils that led to her husband’s death, and that the miracle was meant to protect them from in the first place. After all, what made them “la familia Madrigal” was not a burst of esprit de corps and an overflowing of family affection—it was the sacrifice of their dead ancestor.

And if the magic is slowly withering with each generation, is she responsible for its demise? And—even more troubling—is trauma the only thing that can renew it?

Fearing such a reality, Abuela doubles down, insisting that the magic is strong. If it is weakening at all, she insists, then the blame is Mirabel’s: in her quest to understand her vision, she has been troubling people’s mind about and underming their confidence in the miracle. Besides, after her failed gift ceremony, Bruno received a prophecy that Mirabel would destroy the encanto. Surely it is no coincidence that the moment Mirabel started warning everyone about the miracle’s weakness, everyone starts to become weak?

Yet Bruno did not see one future but two. While Mirabel is the cause of the encanto’s downfall in one, in the other, she is the one who saves it. Inspired by this second fate Mirabel turns the tables on Abuela’s accusations: it is not Mirabel’s fears that are destroying the tradition, but Abuela’s unyielding pressure on the family. She is one destroying the family’s faith in the encanto. Her blinded insistence that everything is fine, that the magic is fine, is stifling concerns and making things worse. Rather than threatening the encanto, Mirabel is saving it from Abuela’s zeal.

In the climatic scene, while each confronts and blames the other, cracks appear—not visionary ones like those Mirabel once saw, but real structural defects—and spread throughout the house. The candle’s flame flickers, fades, and dies, the casa’s magic disappearing with it, and the house crumbles in a heap. Mirabel is stunned. In tragic irony, her determination to bring about the happier fate of Bruno’s vision has fulfilled that prophecy’s darker outcome.

Still, this is a kid’s movie, so we do not end in tragedy. Mirabel and Abuela reconcile, and in their reconciliation, they realize their role in the encanto’s collapse. Abuela recognizes that her zeal for the encanto cannot be replicated by each generation—that in fact, it should not be. Her zeal for the miracle emerged from the specific trauma of losing her husband, from being forced to raise three infants on her own. For her, the miracle was a rescue from death’s door. But because they have never known such fears, since they have only known what the miracle provides and not what it cost, they will also never feel the same anxiety over that miracle’s loss. The very success of the encanto is manifest in its invisibility.

Abuela learns that a good tradition, if it wishes to continue across generations, can never remain fixed in its origins, for that tradition will advance that next generation beyond the conditions of its origin. While the encanto might have been born from trauma, its purpose is to ensure that that trauma never happens again. When people like Abuela try to freeze that tradition in its origins, then that tradition does indeed become a finite resource that depletes itself as the originating generation dies off.

But that does not mean that Abuela’s trauma is irrelevant. As she reconciles with Abuela, Mirabel sees in another vision her grandfather charging at the marauders to protect his family. She then sees her grandmother falling to her knees, clutching three infants to her chest, sobbing in despair. No longer is that Abuela, the domineering matriarch, but a terrified young mother, searching desperately for inner reserves to soldier on. Mirabel realizes that the miracle emerged not from her grandfather’s death per se but from Abuela’s subsequent commitment to raise her family in love, from her refusal to let her family suffer her husband’s fate. She is given to see the depths of love necessary to produce a miracle—and the depths of love necessary to sustain it going forward. Without fixing a tradition in a single moment, it is nonetheless the responsibility of each generation to look backwards and draw on its original goodness, letting that tradition renew itself in them.

The domestic drama of Encanto can seem slight compared to the fairy tale politics of previous Disney classics. The familia Madrigal do not rule over Pride Rock or in the castle of Arendelle. And, for all just discussed, it must be acknowledged that Encanto is a flawed film. Its opens with an exposition of the encanto, followed by an unintelligible musical number that provides more exposition of the encanto, followed by a scene (Antonio’s gift ceremony) that is largely a demonstration of the encanto. After that, the film’s second act repeats three times the pattern of Mirabel playing amateur therapist to angsty family members. It’s understandable why the film, if it is remembered today at all, is known only for its songs. But where most of Disney’s more regal works imagine a fantasy of perfect renewal, in which the elimination of the villain restores the kingdom back to its idealized state, Encanto dares to imagine a far more difficult villain to kill: entropy. Tradition, a people’s way of life, is not always threatened by a megalomaniac lusting after cosmic power; sometimes, it is worn down by time itself. And those threats come not only for the court but also for the hearth. For these cases, repair and renewal, again and again, are the only remedy. Encanto might not have made the splash that Frozen or Moana did, but like its protagonist, future generations might find more there worth returning to than originally expected.