Comment by thaumasiotes
5 years ago
> I found the elder sister being physically strong and an impressive leader and yet still a woman and also have vulnerability to be pretty new. Her arc didn’t involve
Well, I thought Encanto had good music and animation at the same time that the writing and plotting was a train wreck, and this is one of the best examples why.
Luisa sings a song about how she's stressed by all the responsibilities she has. Except that she doesn't have any responsibilities - they are not depicted before or after her song. She's not a leader and no one follows her. She doesn't run anything in the family or in the village. All she ever does is lift things and put them down at the direction of someone else. Her song makes no sense and her character has no arc.
The movie takes this same approach to the much more plot-central relationship between Mirabel and Isabela - we're told that they hate each other, and then they have to make up, so there's a song that accomplishes that by hand-waving. This level of writing makes the song worse so that the movie can also be worse.
I agree, I enjoyed the movie for what it was but I found the story pretty lacking compared to some of the other recent Disney (and Pixar) animated features. It kind of felt like the powers were chosen for the sake of pretty animation and/or good songs, with much less thought to how they work in the core story.
The sister that can hear everything is especially bad for the internal consistency of the story. Perhaps with a different personality it could have been pulled off, but it made no sense that she couldn't contain her excitement over the Bruno vision gossip, then later on casually mentions she always knew Bruno was living in the walls of the house.
> It kind of felt like the powers were chosen for the sake of pretty animation and/or good songs, with much less thought to how they work in the core story.
There is a home run in "how the powers would work in the setting" (though not the story - neither character matters to that) in the character of Felix. He's Pepa's husband, and a person with her "powers" (inadvertent influence over the weather) would, in reality, end up with a husband exactly like him. He sees the positive side of everything. If there is no positive side, he talks about something else that is positive. He never, ever contradicts her. This is exactly what the local countryside needs!
But this only shows up in one verse of "We Don't Talk About Bruno". And I'm surprised it happened at all - Pepa and Felix are so insignificant within the movie that nobody needed to think about either of them one way or the other.