Thread by @AaronWorthing

So I watched #encanto either the day it came out or the day after, but it was one of those situations where it was so chaotic in the house that I felt like I really wasn’t taking it in. So I watched it again in calmer circumstances. I think ultimately it’s a good but not…

… Great movie.

like remember in frozen where despite the existence of a nominal bad guy, the real conflict was just working out the differences between these two sisters and their love winning out? That was new and different…

#encanto is pretty much nothing but that. It really amounts to a family group therapy session. And because it’s not new, and because there’s pretty much nothing else happening, it’s not very good as a plot. A few other complaints include…

… that the protagonist, Mirabel, is a little too… I struggled to find a good word for it but “jaunty” is pretty close. Now this is mitigated by the movie suggesting she’s this way to make up for her lack of, more or less, super powers. The other problem…

… it is a matter of very personal taste. To me I don’t like the kinds of musicals, typically, that is just wall-to-wall singing. I want to see a certain amount of just plain normal talking and doing things between the songs. This isn’t very scientific but it’s got to…

… have a ratio that I like. The only reason why I don’t knock Hamilton more for that is because I know the history so well that I don’t need the normal talking parts to fill in the blanks. But when I watched it with my wife who isn’t as much of a history geek, I had to pause…

… constantly to explain to her what the hell is going on. so I suspect Hamilton doesn’t work very well as educational material.

#encanto doesn’t have wall-to-wall singing but it’s too close to that for my tastes. That all being said, I’ll give Disney praise for…

…this: it’s still not a carbon copy of anything. That’s something disney and Pixar animation doesn’t get enough credit for. I mean they are making the movies that 20 or 30 years from now we might see a “live action remake” of…

…while I think this movie leaned too hard into the family therapy angle that was part of frozen, I still don’t feel like they are copies of each other. And of course the animation and even the songs themselves are excellent. So worth a watch but not my favorite of recent years

/end