Skip to main content

Encanto review – Disney musical casts its spell with a little help from Lin-Manuel Miranda

Miranda’s slinky soundtrack and unexpected subtleties align as Disney’s new outsider heroine tries to save her family from ruin

The Madrigal clan are a little unusual. The burly Luisa (voiced by Jessica Darrow) possesses superhuman strength, Isabela (Diane Guerrero) has the ability to make flowers burst into bloom, Pepa (Carolina Gaitán) can control the weather with her mood. It’s only bespectacled Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz) who hasn’t been blessed with magic. An outsider in her own family, she fits right into a lineage of recent Disney animation heroines, including Moana and Frozen’s Elsa. When the Madrigals’ prized enchanted candle begins to dim (and with it, everyone’s powers), cracks appear in the foundation of the family casa. It’s Mirabel who must figure out how to keep the flame alight.

Set among the mountains of Colombia, this sparky musical covers plenty of well-trodden terrain, including sibling rivalry and the crushing weight of family expectations. What’s interesting and unexpected is the film’s subtle acknowledgement of culturally specific generational trauma and displacement. “We can’t lose our home,” repeats matriarch Abuela Alma (María Cecilia Botero), who recounts being forced from her house by “unknown forces” once before. The film also boasts a soundtrack of earworms written by Lin-Manuel Miranda; the slinky, salsa-influenced We Don’t Talk About Bruno rattled around in my head for days.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/316OgFp
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more