What's your opinion on the movie encanto?
And of course my first ask ever was Encanto. For that, have the 🕯️ for future reference if you ever wanna ask anything else anonymously.
Most Colombians that I’ve talked to like the movie, a good few love it. It does a good job of putting a country that’s not often portrayed positively on a screen as massive as Disney.
Encanto has a nice message about not letting trauma influence family dynamics.
But there are a few of things that make me personally dislike the entire premise of the movie.
1. The location they used as inspiration. I’ve been to Cocora Valley just to be there. Because it’s considered a national attraction, I didn’t tour it intimately like the Disney crew that bragged about going there for research. The area around this valley, and sadly the family farmland and villages nearby, are purposely ignored by the Colombian government in order to maintain their quaintness. The valley is only invested in enough to look pretty to the tourists. When Disney visited it, the location was boosted for Disney reasons. My country is now like Hawaii with LILO and Stitch, known as “that place where Encanto happened.”
2. American family values being resold to my family. I watched encanto with my family on Christmas the year it came out, dubbed to Spanish. I had already watched half the movie before, in English. And in both instances I noticed that the movie’s teachings about trauma ignores that Colombian families suffered more that just the phobia We have bigger fish to fry at home than the Americanized version of “kiss hug and simplify your parents’ lives into perfect or abusive.”
3. The music personally offends me because I’m a trained Colombian musician. We have two major music schools: one for regular classical, and the conservatory for traditional music. Many musicians in Colombia gained their respect from being basically bards. We still respect those who learn traditional music by oral tradition, and we listen to those that listen to the OGs far more than pop. That’s why a Puerto Rican guy doing some relatively generic music disappointed me, especially when Disney literally hired Carlos Vives (a pop musician who we respect for having learned traditional genres) and Sebastian Yatra (an actor who grew up on traditional music) to participate. Colombia takes our “exported culture” as we call it, very seriously.
Long story short, I get why others like it, and I enjoy it as a movie, but I have specific Colombian reasons to be miffed by it.
