Saturday, January 15, 2022

enchanted

We have Disney+, so I watched their new animated film Encanto as soon as it was released. As I reported here, I liked it: the colorful and expressive animation was excellent, and I liked the variety and individuality of the characters. There were aspects of the plot I didn't understand, and still don't even after watching the movie 3 or 4 times, but at least it had a plot, and one worth puzzling over.

What didn't hit me much at first was the music: songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda in a Colombian idiom (the story is set there) that he learned for the purpose. But those songs have been growing on me, and especially now that I've seen an article on the sudden viral popularity of "We Don't Talk About Bruno." Nobody expected this one to be a hit, partly because it's a plot song that requires you to know the story and characters to make any sense of it at all, so we'll get back to it in a minute.

But a lot of the commenters on that article said that their favorite song from the movie is a different one, "Surface Pressure," which has also been doing well in the charts. This one is more self-contained, but like "Let It Go," the last big Disney hit, it benefits from some explanation of who's singing it and why. I recommend seeing the movie, but if you haven't, here's the basics.

Encanto is set in an isolated Colombian valley and tells of a family who live in a magical house and have magical powers. The heroine is Mirabel, age 15, the only grandchild in the family with no powers and who wonders why that is. She has a song about how isolated she feels from her family because of this, but her two older sisters each also have a song about the burdens and frustrations they feel. "Surface Pressure" is the song of Luisa, whose power is super-strength and whose self-identity is entirely wrapped up in this. The voice actress is Jessica Darrow, and here it is:

Now for "We Don't Talk About Bruno." Bruno is Mirabel's vanished outcast uncle. His power was to foretell the future, and this often caused controversy. When Mirabel was still very small, Bruno disappeared, and the family has pulled the carpet over his very existence. Mirabel believes that Bruno's last prophecy may be a key to cracks she's perceiving in the magic. She finds the prophecy, which takes the form of the shards of a piece of glowing green glass, and discovers that the picture embedded in it is of herself. She asks her aunt Pepa what this might mean, but Pepa doesn't want to talk about it, and her uncle Félix is even more emphatic that Bruno's prophecies are trouble. Pepa's power is to control the weather, but she doesn't have much conscious direction over this, and that's behind the story she and Félix tell:

0.28. This flashback is the first we see of Bruno in the movie. Ominous, isn't he?
0.56. Cut to Mirabel's cousin Dolores. Her power is super-hearing, and the burden of what she's telling Mirabel here is that she can hear that Bruno is still living in the house, in the secret passages behind the walls.
1.15. Cousin Camilo is a shapeshifter and something of a trickster. He alternates here between his natural appearance and an ultra-sinister version of Bruno.
1.35. A verse for various townsfolk who treat the family as the local gentry.
1.57. Mirabel's sister Isabela, who has fonder memories of Bruno.
2.14. A line for the grandmother (unseen here) telling Isabela that her suitor Mariano is arriving for dinner.
2.16. But Dolores secretly yearns for Mariano.
2.27. Isabela and Mirabel don't get along.
2.38. That's the glowing shards of the prophecy in Mirabel's handbag.
2.44. Camilo being a trickster again.
2.48. Did you notice that each verse had its own tune? Now Miranda combines them and plays them all at once. This trick has been pulled before (see the "Tonight Quintet" in West Side Story for one), but it's always fabulous whenever it's done.
3.00. One of the symptoms of the cracking of the magic is that Luisa is losing her powers. (Why just Luisa at first? That's part of what I don't understand about the plot.)

What happens next, and what is Bruno really like? You'll just have to watch the movie.

No comments:

Post a Comment