“It likes some people more than others, it sometimes wakes up nice and cheerful and sometimes it’s a little sluggish.” The directors came to think of the house as the family dog, says Howard. The family’s house became a thirteenth character, interacting with its human inhabitants through magic.
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“There’s no simple background thing happening - the audience needs to know emotionally where that character is at, and that takes a lot of detailed work.” That meant the animators “had to be very specific with the animation every single time you see those characters”, Bush says. The extended Madrigal family gave the film 12 distinct characters, each with a story arc. When Encanto moved into its production phase - under quarantine conditions - the ambition and scope of the story created challenges for animators, effects whizzes and even choreographers. We got a lot of good details that found their way into the movie, especially about sibling and cousin relationships.” Creative challengesĬoncept art for the family’s magical house and (right) as seen in the film
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“We shared drafts of the script with them to get a gut check on whether this movie was true to families they knew.
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“They became an important resource,” says Castro Smith, a Latinx playwright also known for her TV work on horror series The Haunting Of Hill House and young female drama Sweetbitter. We didn’t want to pretend that the film represented all of the country but we did want the family to be diverse and to represent the different regions.”įamilia, a pre-existing group of Latinx Disney Animation employees, provided another kind of guidance. Colombia, Bush comments, “is five or six countries in one. Specially formed to guide the project, the Colombian Cultural Trust included experts in the anthropology, botany, music, language and architecture of different parts of the country. Though other planned research visits to Colombia had to be abandoned when the pandemic hit, the filmmakers were able, as script development continued, to call on two groups with inside knowledge of the region. “Every single detail in the movie is based on something that we saw,” Bush says, “or someone that we met who then helped us understand things better.” The trip also seeded ideas about everything from musical rhythms to the kind of soup the film’s characters eat in a key scene. We started looking into what kind of magic it is and the notion of magical realism kept popping up.”Ī 2018 research trip to Colombia taken by the directors, Miranda and others gave the filmmakers access to local cultural experts and led them to discover the small northeastern hill town of Barichara, preserved just as it was a century ago, which served as an inspiration for the town in the film.
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“The magic of Colombia and Latin America isn’t European magic. Magical realism, the literary genre known to many through the work of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, emerged as a natural corollary, says Bush. Filmmaker friends from the country, he says, “pointed us to Colombia as a crossroads of culture, music and tradition that blended a lot of what Latin America has to offer.” Setting the story in Colombia was no accident, Howard explains. Family misfit Mirabel (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz, from the film version of Miranda’s musical In The Heights) is the only Madrigal child not bestowed with a unique gift, but when she discovers that the magic surrounding the town is waning she becomes the last hope for keeping the family’s traditions and unity alive. The result - directed by Howard and Bush, written by Bush and co‑director Charise Castro Smith and featuring songs by Miranda - is the tale of the Madrigals, a multi-generational family living in a magical house in an enchanted town hidden in the mountains of Colombia. The two also knew, adds Howard, that Lin-Manuel Miranda, fresh from his songwriting work alongside screenwriter Bush on Disney’s Moana, “had wanted for years to do a definitive Latin American Disney musical”.
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“And we knew we wanted to talk about a big family and the complexities of family life.” All those strands came together, though, in Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Encanto, thanks to a meeting of minds between former Disney collaborators.Īfter working together on the studio’s Oscar-winning 2016 release Zootopia (aka Zootropolis), Byron Howard and Jared Bush “wanted our next project together to be a musical,” says the former. Families and music are perennial elements in feature animation, but magical realism and the culture of Latin America are more usually the province of highbrow literature.