Antihero Realness
Disney got it right.
Yeah, there was plenty of magic.
A girl with super strength, her sister who could will flowers to life.
Their mother whose food had healing powers.
The tía whose mood affects the weather, the cousin who can shape shift, and his sister who has super hearing.
Oh, and their Uncle Bruno, who is clairvoyant. But, we don’t talk about Bruno.
(We’ll talk about Bruno in a minute.)
Who we will talk about is Mirabel, the protagonista of Disney Pixar’s latest animated feature, Encanto. What sets Mirabel apart from the rest of the enchanted Madrigal family is that she is absent magical powers. She’s simply a young girl who loves her family.
Her family, however, is trapped in a vicious cycle trying to serve the mythical Colombian community where they live, while upholding the family tradition of greatness as dictated by abuela. They are, however, cracking underneath their exterior, and it’s Mirabel who recognizes this and attempts to save it, but not in a fantastical way.
Spoilers aside, Mirabel saves her family by way of her realness. Though her family sees her as flawed, she is in fact the strongest of them all, and is the one who redeems them as people, and not just their gifts.
Where Disney tends to uphold the classic fairy tale trope that only goodness should be bestowed on good people, they flipped the script a bit by showing that even those wonderful people (the larger Madrigal family) need to mourn sometimes, and even those who have mourned (Mirabel), are permitted to triumph in their averageness.
That is to say, Mirabel wasn’t crowned the queen of Encanto, nor did she earn her power in the end. She simply stayed her wonderful, normal self.
Where Mirabel was at first an outcast, she became the hero, as did her tío Bruno, who was himself outcast because of his prophetic visions. By reminding his family to simply be and not aim for perfection, he becomes the other antihero of the film.
While Disney once again upped the fairy tale ante, they also delivered in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Multiracial characters, different skin tones, a setting other than Europe, and music by the amazing Lin-Manuel Miranda, made this nothing like a princess film with talking birds.
Encanto also added another Latino chapter to their book of tales. Though there’s always going to be holes and blind spots, Disney created a story that honored a culture rather than appropriated it. They did their homework and created a world of emotion and feeling specific to a Latin American culture that can be accessible to all. Disney’s first, and very successful attempt at this was with Coco a few years prior.
Like Coco, Encanto reminds us that there’s something perfect about imperfect families. For one, we are each part of one. And when we begin to embrace those imperfections and remind our families who we are without apology, the magic really unfolds.
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Image: Shutterstock
