Encanto (2021)
★★★½ — Encanto (2021)
There's a moment in Encanto where the weight of an entire family's expectations comes crashing down on one girl who has never been given so much as a single magical gift, and it hits harder than you might expect from a Disney animated film about a talking house in Colombia. That's the thing about this one: it earns its emotional punches quietly, through accumulated warmth rather than big dramatic swings. It doesn't always pull it off, but when it does, it genuinely sings.
The setup is deceptively simple. The Madrigal family live in a magical encanto, an enchanted village tucked away in the Colombian mountains, and every child is blessed with a supernatural power when they come of age. Every child, that is, except Mirabel. She's the odd one out, the only ordinary member of an extraordinary household, and when the magic holding everything together starts to crack, she's the one who has to fix it. There's real emotional intelligence in making the hero the person her own family overlooks. It gives the story its spine.
The animation is extraordinary. Every frame is packed with intricate detail: the patterns on the clothing, the architecture of the family home, the lush Colombian landscapes blooming around it all. It feels rooted in real culture rather than a tourist-board approximation of it, and that specificity makes the world feel alive in a way that a lot of animated films can't quite manage. Disney clearly did their homework, and it shows in every corner of the screen.
Then there are the songs. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote them, and while his fingerprints are all over the Broadway-inflected numbers, he's also genuinely absorbed the Latin rhythms he's working with. "We Don't Talk About Bruno" became a phenomenon for good reason: it's witty, propulsive, and does the impossible job of conveying an enormous amount of backstory while being genuinely fun to listen to. The rest of the score is strong too, character-driven in the way the best musical theatre always is, though a couple of numbers in the middle section don't quite land with the same force. I'd compare the musical ambition here to Tangled, which also managed to weave songs into its emotional architecture rather than just dropping them in for colour.
My main gripe is the pacing. The middle act loses its footing a bit, and the film is carrying a very large ensemble cast that it doesn't always know what to do with. Several family members get a song and a moment in the spotlight, but they don't all get genuine arcs. There's so much going on that the emotional shifts can come across as rushed, and a few potentially powerful beats don't land with the impact they deserve because the film has already moved on. It's the kind of problem that comes from having too many good ideas and not quite enough time to honour all of them.
What holds it together is Mirabel herself. Her quiet resilience, that particular ache of being invisible in a room full of people who are supposed to love you, is handled with more honesty than you might expect. The film touches on intergenerational trauma and the crushing weight of perfectionism in ways that feel genuine rather than grafted on for Adult Audience Credibility. It's not heavy-handed about it. It just lets those themes breathe inside the story, and trusts the audience to feel them.
This isn't Disney's most tightly constructed film. Zootopia is probably the studio's most satisfying piece of storytelling from this recent era, in my view. But Encanto has something that's harder to manufacture than a perfect screenplay: it has genuine warmth. It's culturally alive in a way that feels rare, the music is mostly wonderful, and the central emotional argument about self-worth and family damage is handled with real care. It doesn't reinvent anything, but it makes the familiar feel worth revisiting.
Three and a half stars.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2026-04-15
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus · fuboTV
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Byron Howard: Zootopia+ (2022) · Zootopia 2 (2025) · Zootopia (2016) · Tangled (2010)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
