Healing Latin-American generational trauma in Encanto (2021)
Encanto (Byron Howard & Jared Bush, 2021), Disney’s 60th animated film inspired by Latin-American culture tells the story of a magical family, the family Madrigal. The narrative follows the dynamics of the Madrigal family tree across generations in the town of Encanto, ultimately spearheaded by 15-year-old Mirabel, the only member of the family without magical powers. Although Encanto has a clear protagonist in Mirabel, the story's heart lies within the collective rather than the individual; it is about how an unaddressed trauma is shared within the Latin-American family and creeps through the cracks of their relationships, making them unable to connect and understand each other. Such is the particular case between Mirabel and Abuela Alma Madrigal: her 75-year-old grandmother and the family matriarch. The prologue of the film shows how Alma became such a matriarch after having to flee her home with her three new-born babies and losing her husband due to a violent attack to her town. Trauma becomes weaved throughout the Madrigal family as a unity, and one needs to integrate all of them as pieces of a puzzle to gain a complete view of its impact. Mirabel's role as the film's protagonist is as the puzzle master that gathers and puts the pieces together (much as she does with Bruno's vision). However, it is not enough to rely only on Mirabel's journey but to see too how she fits within the whole.
In this way, Encanto brings to the forefront the ideologies of a community-driven Latin-American culture. This blog develops an analysis of Encanto that discusses how the film creates a story about the experiences and repercussions of inter-generational trauma within archetypal Latin-American families, and what Disney's computer-animated film has to say about the processes of healing. Encanto reaches out to the collective experience of the Latin-American people, which becomes a significant step for recognising and representing Latin-Americans both inside and outside the global north, especially for a film produced in the United States by a corporation that many cultural theorists have argued has taken over children's mainstream narratives during the course of the twentieth century. In this blog, I reflect on the narrative and animation of Encanto to show how the film dismantles monolithic stereotypes regarding the Latin-American experience, and depicts the people of Latin America via a rich mosaic of characters. The Madrigals’ story takes place in a vibrant community, which shows the rich diversity of Latin American people. The townsfolk of Encanto portray countless combinations of light, brown and dark skin, with all kinds of hair textures and bone structures (Fig. 1). A video essay produced by Insider magazine shows the arduous process of the Disney animators to create every category of hair texture, from 1A to 4C, seen in the movie. This variety of physical differences reflects Latin Americans' eclectic background and the continent's specific history of colonisation. However, depicting Latin-American history and culture does not stop at the film's character design. The core of Encanto's story deals with Latin-American families' intimacies, traditions, and experiences.
Fig.1 - Townsfolk from Encanto.
Family Dynamics and Inter-generational Trauma
Inspired by Gabriel García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Encanto tells the story of a multi-generational family living under one roof. The Madrigal family becomes the nucleus of their larger community, as they devote their magical gifts to their town's well-being. This principle of the collective and the interconnected-ness between the family and the town of Encanto establishes the film's interest in personal and communal histories of trauma, as well as narratives of reconciliation. Psychologists have studied how an important part of an individual's personality and behaviour derives from the role they fulfil within their family, which impacts the individual's self-understanding and self-knowledge. As Salvador Minuchin argues: "Instead of focusing on the individual, [one should focus] on the person within the family" (1977: 2). In Encanto, each of the characters' personalities, struggles, and – importantly - their magical powers, are informed by the role they fulfil within the family. In a family built upon trauma, these roles become defined by it.
Fig. 2 - The Family Madrigal is arranged in a rainbow composition.
From the beginning, the aesthetic ideation of the characters is informed by this principle. Each of the characters is designed to reflect their individuality and belonging. For example, their clothes portray their gifts, and their physical features portray inherited traits such as Julieta, Pepa, Abuela, and Isabella's similar nose, or the varied skin tones but similar curly hair of Pepa and Felix's children. Even their individual colour hues harmonise and create a rainbow-like unity (Fig. 2). The characters clearly reflect their place and connections in the family as parts of a whole, showing how they are fundamentally linked to the collective. As the story reveals each character, we see how they are defined by their roles within their close-knitted community: Luisa, as the one to carry everyone’s burdens, Isabella as the golden child, Pepa as the one to ensure the sun is always shinning, and Julietta to heal everyone’s ailments.
As Mirabel states in the opening number, Abuela is the head of the family and the one that "runs the show." After all, the Madrigal family originates with her. Just as her DNA runs through everyone's veins, so does her trauma. Due to this, Abuela Alma's relationship with her children and grandchildren is the most significant of the film, and it also penetrates the relationships that the family members have with each other. For example, Isabella and Mirabel’s relationship is deeply affected by Abuela's favouritism of the first and rigidity towards the other. However, Mirabel discovers that her and Isabella's struggles are two sides of the same coin; theirs and all other issues impacting her family originate from Abuela's history of trauma.
Fig. 3 - The crack in the casita show the divide between Abuela Alma and Mirabel.
Fig. 4 - Colombian refugees turning to Alma as the leader of their group.
As the matriarch and leader of the family and the town, Abuela Alma uses a firm hand on her kids and grandchildren. Her unforgiving discipline inflicts hurt on all her family members and is causing them to fall apart. This divide is visualised by the cracks that begin appearing on the house's surface, and when Mirabel confronts her grandmother about it, the divide between them is announced by one such large crack on the casita's floor (Fig. 3). However, Abuela's role as the matriarch is one that she did not choose, but was instead imposed upon her as a way to survive terrible loss. That is Mirabel's final discovery. Alma's history of trauma begins long before Mirabel was born. Just after she had fallen in love and started a family with Abuelo Pedro, all her dreams and stability were crushed when an armed group terrorised their town.
This event references the Thousand Days' War in Colombia (1899-1902). Carrasco Cara Chards (2022) points out that this kind of conflict was constant in most independent Latin-American countries as they navigated the repercussions and destabilisation from centuries of colonisation. The violence of these conflicts forced many to lose their homes and loved ones; such was Abuela’s story. The violence in her town forced her and Pedro to leave behind the home they had built together, and Pedro was killed before her eyes as she held their three new-born babies. After Pedro died, Alma was left to raise their family and lead the town on her own. She took over that role with all the strength she had left, and with it built the foundation of her town and her casita (Fig. 4).
Fig. 5 - Abuela and Mirabel’s reconciliation surrounded by yellow butterflies.
The trauma Abuela experienced, and her inability to work through it, has affected every aspect of her life. She had lost her home and the love of her life. Therefore, it became her sole purpose to avoid losing the magical home that had saved her. Under these conditions, she raised and educated her children and, hence, influenced how her children educated theirs. Her fear of becoming destitute once more made her keep her family in check, not allowing for any mistakes that could jeopardise their miracle; everything had to be perfect. For this reason, when Mirabel does not receive her gift and the magic wavers, it reopens Abuela's wounds. It makes her believe everything she has worked hard for was in danger. This threat makes her extra hard on Mirabel, who grows up having to compensate for her "lack," focusing all her efforts on winning her grandmother's approval and feeling 'good enough.' This search for perfection becomes Abuela's downfall, as it breaks the things she wanted to protect: her house and her family. When the house crumbles, Mirabel runs away to the river where her grandfather was killed. Abuela Alma finds her and shares with her the story, and although this event had already been narrated in the prologue, this time Abuela tells the story with a completely different tone; instead of a matter-of-fact narration, the film conveys its enormous emotional weight. This second re-telling of the miracle's origin reveals much more about Alma's history than what had already been told. It addresses not only the events but also the suffering and loss that came with them.
The change in the language of this narration becomes a powerful way in which the film conveys the presence of Abuela's past in the family's present. Up to this point, the film's dialogue had been a mix of English and Spanish, where the dominant language had been the former. However, in this flashback, the language changes completely to Spanish with Lin-Manuel Miranda's song Dos Orugüitas playing over Abuela's love story. The change from English to Spanish creates a sense of returning to the family's roots, while this mix of English and Spanish also resonates with the Latin-American diaspora in the United States. As Spanish permeates their present speech, so does Abuela's past in their lives and psyche. In this moment of mutual understanding, Abuela sees the hurt she has inflicted on her family, and Mirabel recognises Abuela's profound trauma at the centre of her family's dynamics (Fig, 5). This recognition drives Mirabel to become the cycle breaker who discovers and resolves the hidden wounds. She helps each family member to heal, and "when the structure of the family group is transformed, the positions of members in that group are altered accordingly" (Minuchin, 1977: 2). Luisa stops being hard on herself, Isabella is able to be authentically herself, Pepa learns to embrace her feelings, Bruno is welcomed back into the family, and Mirabel gains a sense of self-worth and belonging. Therefore, the cracks in casita emulate the cracks in the family's structure: only after the family understands each other and works together to heal their wounds the magic of casita returns.
In conclusion, this blog post has shown how Disney’s Encanto captures the history and struggles of Latin-American families by showing how past trauma is inherited from one generation to the other, breaking the Madrigal family apart. Disney's film shows how personalities and roles are moulded around the expectations of a deeply wounded matriarch, and how through the mutual understanding of the generations the family is able to be healed. This healing is represented in the figure of their home, casita, supported by rich animation that captures the eclectic background of the Latin-American community, breaking stereotypes and providing a deeper understanding of the culture.
**Article published: August 19, 2022**
References
Carrasco Cara Chards, María Isabel. 2022. “Encanto's (likely) historical context: Why the grandparents have to flee?” Available at: https://culturacolectiva.com/history/encanto-disney-historical-context-thousand-days-war-colombia/.
Faris, Wendy B. 2004. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
García Márquez, Gabriel. 1967. Cien años de Soledad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana.
Minuchin, Salvador. 1977. Families & Family Therapy. Tavistock, London.
Lancaster Jones, Juan Pablo Reyes. 2021. The Art of Encanto. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Available at: https://disney-studios-awards.s3.amazonaws.com/encanto/books/flipJSi56TV4ke/index.html.
Varela, Márcio Danilo Mota. 2010. “Critical analysis on the communicative process between children’s magical realism literature and animation movies: conceptual primitivism aesthetic context for the referential problems on children’s texts.” Comunicação e Sociedade 18: 117-132.
Biography
Mariana Pintado Zurita is a School of arts funded PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. She gained her bachelor's degree in Graphic Design at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She completed a Master of Arts degree in Film Studies at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Mariana is supervised by Professor Timothy Barker and Dr Amy Holdsworth. Her PhD research investigates time and temporal emotions in long-term sequels and series. The project focuses on a close textual analysis of sequels such as The Antoine Doinel Series, The Before Trilogy, Trainspotting, and Blade Runner.