I recently watched Disney’s 2021 animated film Encanto.
This film centers on Mirabel, a girl who is part of a Latin American community held together by the gift of magic given to them ever since her grandfather Pedro (husband of Alma, Mirabel’s grandmother) was killed by sacrificing himself for the family. Each member of the family is given a magic gift at the age of five, but Mirabel feels excluded from the group because she never received any magic gift. This exclusion is represented by being left out of a family photo op. But Mirabel understands what Alma and the other adults do not: that the magic holding the community together is fading. She perceives cracks in the family structure that no one else can see.
Most stories have a fall and redemption motif: something wrong that has to be put right. In this story the thing that is wrong is the community’s fading magic. As things go wrong, Grandmother Alma accuses Mirabel of being responsible for the fading magic, causing Mirabel to feel she will never be good enough to please her grandmother. Mirabel then denounces her grandmother in front of the community, alleging that her grandmother’s unrealistic expectations are the real reason the miracle is going away.
After yelling at her grandmother, Mirabel runs away and ends up by the river where her grandfather Pedro was killed and the magic first began. The grandmother, Alma, comes to Mirabel and realizes she was wrong. Alma apologizes to Mirabel and confesses to the trauma that had been controlling her. The family then has another photo op where they remember to include Mirabel. Mirabel helped the family realize their true strength and move beyond the unrealistic expectations that came as a byproduct of their magical abilities. So Alma becomes, in a sense, the savior of the community – moving from feeling like an outcast to being a catalyst for healing. Her ability to heal the family ends up being her true gift.
Is there anything disordered about the messaging and symbolism of this story? That is a question I recently asked my friends to discuss. Here are some insights from my friends.
Encanto Promotes Disordered Relationship With Elders
Older stories, including all myths and folktales, never have a situation where well-meaning adults turn out to be wrong and the child is right to ignore them, although we do see this in agenda-driven children’s literature of the 20th century, such as the Communist-era story Peter and the Wolf.
In Encanto and similar stories (for example, the 2022 Disney animated film, Turning Red) the child acts like a mentor to her elders, who have to go on a journey to realize that the child was right all along.
Encanto Encourages Weakness
Films like Encanto end of encouraging weakness in children. Consider Luisa Madrigal, who’s magical gift is superhuman strength. She comes to realize that inside she is really weak. Okay, that’s some good self-knowledge that might, in the context of the hero’s journey, lead to Luisa facing her inner demons and achieving inner as well as outward strength. But then comes the kicker: her weakness is because she sees her vocation in terms of serving others! This is all in her song “Surface Pressure,” in which Luisa laments that “I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service” and longs for the “joy or relaxation, or simple pleasure.”
Contrast this with Spider-Man 2 where Peter takes a “you do you” moment to stop being Spider Man and focus on himself, play the guitar, get good grades, etc. – all things that are in themselves good but represent an abandonment of his vocation and lead to others in the community suffering and even dying since spiderman isn’t there to rescue them. In Spider-Man 2 this is seen as bad, or at least it’s a Peter’s “resisting the call” moment. When Peter finally embraces his vocation, he says, “Sometimes, to do what’s right, we have to be steady and give up the things we want the most—even our dreams.” What a great line, but could that idea ever appear in a contemporary Disney animated film?
Encanto Burdens Children With Adult Themes
Contemporary children’s films often deal with complex themes. Consider how Toy Story 4 centers on the existential crisis of the toy Forky who thinks he’s trash and keeps trying to throw himself away. Amanda Scherker analyzed the film and showed how the plot and themes center around the type of existentialism promulgated by Jean-Paul Sartre. One gets the feeling from these films like this that they are not really written with children in mind so much as using story-telling as fodder to process adult psychological struggles.
Encanto suffers from the same problem. The film is about dealing with trauma, balancing responsibility to the self with responsibility to the community, the disjunct between the outward and the inward, and the moral ambiguity the arises from the family’s magic being in one sense good (because it protects them), but in another sense bad (because individuals come to rely on magic for their self-understanding), and various other things that front-load children with the complexities of adult psychological dilemmas.
Many will no-doubt argue that it is helpful to give children the vocabulary for dealing with adult dilemmas. I don’t completely disagree with that, but I think it needs to be age-appropriate. After all, if children are given stories with black and white morals (where the witches really are wicked, where good magic really is totally good, and where well-meaning elders really are wise) then they will have the strength later in life to face the ambiguous situations; they will have the clarity to actually understand the grey areas of life. But if we start off by burdening children with the existential crises of adults, then we are inadvertently depriving them of the type of well-formed moral imagination they will need for successfully navigating whatever existential crises life later throw their way.
Further Reading