It’s Disney time again, and it’s also time to take another look at what Lin-Manuel Miranda’s been getting up to in 2021. The music here is pretty good and keeps with what Miranda is good at, and man, is it catchy. I’m still humming The Family Madrigal as I’m writing this, and the individual character songs like Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz)’s Waiting For A Miracle, Isabela (Diane Guerrero)’s What Else Can I Do?, and even Luisa (Jessica Darrow)’s Surface Pressure are all bops. Hell, We Don’t Talk About Bruno even has some Frozen-level irony in the lyrics, which is quite the treat.
And like with In The Heights, the soundtrack is couched in the overall cultural aesthetic, focusing on a Colombian family who basically all have superpowers, save for Mirabel. I get that I’m a stan for capeshit at this point, so it goes without saying that I like this idea, but the way the powers themselves are treated in-story is what really got my attention. The “gifts” that each of the family members have represent both their personalities and what they can contribute to the larger family unit. It’s very insular, which is furthered by how the vast majority of the plot takes place within the walls of their family home (which is also sentient and pretty much the coolest home I’ve ever seen in a Disney movie) along with a quite refreshing change-up for the Disney formula in that there isn’t a central villain for the main characters to fight.
Instead, it’s more about their conflicts with each other, with Mirabel and her worries of being the cursed black sheep of the family taking centre stage. I’ve seen quite a few takes where this is an allegory for her being queer (which, given the presence of John Leguizamo’s Bruno as the estranged uncle makes some sense), but knowing how skittish Disney as a whole has been when it comes to queer representation, I personally don’t hold much importance to that idea. Not that I feel I need to, since the main drive of the plot is the family dynamics and the expectations placed on each member, primarily off the back of María Cecilia Botero’s Abuela and her insistence that everything be “normal”. Well, as far as this family is concerned at least, what with the super-strength and shape-shifting and ability to talk to animals.
Considering how small the stakes are with this, and how singular the setting is, the visuals really work at making it feel so lively that the audience doesn’t need anything more than that. I am once again impressed with just how far lighting effects have come in my lifetime with animated features, and with two DPs credited specifically with doing the lighting, it is quite gorgeous to see on the screen. It does wonders in balancing the magic realism of the characters and their abilities with the insular nature of the plot, and the visual metaphor of the house itself really helps ram home what this kind of conflict and forced expectation can feel like in the moment.
It’s a family film all about the importance of family, not
as what you expect of them but just as your family. Coming from writers
and directors who also worked on Zootopia and Moana, two of Disney’s most
surprising successes in the 2010s, this follows that same pattern of finding
new paths to take with the usual formula, creating a compelling story that
doesn’t need a big bad to fight for there to be a compelling conflict at its
core. Well, maybe we can consider generational trauma and estrangement as the
big bads, but even that is remarkably and refreshingly esoteric for a studio with such a recognisable M.O.
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