one thing i really appreciated about Encanto was how they subverted the sibling roles.
the usual expectation is that the eldest daughter is burdened with having to take care of everyone, the middle child is ignored and the youngest is spoiled. (as a youngest who has experienced more than enough abuse from my family, i've always found this stereotype infuriating)
but in Encanto, this is not the case. Luisa, the middle child, is the one who has to burden all responsibility and try to be strong for everyone. Mirabel, the youngest child, is ignored and overlooked. and Isabella, the oldest, is "spoiled" (although of course, we later see how she has her own problems and is forced to repress herself for the sake of the family).
i think it goes to show that while these stereotypes may be true for a lot of people, sometimes the roles get reversed. the eldest daughter isn't always the one shouldering the burden of responsibility, sometimes it's the middle or youngest. the youngest isn't always spoiled, sometimes it's the eldest. it's an interesting take on family dynamics.
Ok, I was inspired by a previous post to write a character analysis of Julieta.
Ok, I could get behind this take, but only if the entire town’s health does not rest solely on her shoulders. Like if she had help and train
So, the deal with Julieta is that she’s not exactly the golden child, at least not at first. It’s more like she’s the Good Girl of the family. The one that Alma doesn’t have to worry about because she’s so mature for her age. She’s quiet, humble, and kind. The one who may have been overlooked in favor of her louder and more boisterous siblings.
She can heal people with the food she makes and the love she carries for everyone in the Encanto. So therefore, no, she’s not the golden child, she’s the Caretaker.
The extra set of hands Alma needed when things were too much for her. If Alma was feeling down or depressed, or too busy, and Julieta’s siblings were anxious or upset, Julieta would take care of it. No need to bother their mother unless it’s an emergency, right?
It’s been said she was born to be a mother and that’s because she’s been mothering her family and half the town since she was five. Those are the sort of expectations she carries around.
I think that’s what allows her to relate to her older daughters and sobrinos who fill a similar role of support within the family. She’s the healer, the caretaker.
She lends a listening ear; she tries to make you smile with food and words of affirmation; she shoulders the family’s burdens; she sees their hurt and tries her best to lighten the load.
She was probably the one Alma was eager to marry off first, because she would make such a good mom and matriarch to the family, kind of like Isabela. So good for the Encanto.
But instead of marrying the perfect guy, like Isa planned to, she married the perfect guy for her, Agustin.
I also think she blames herself for Bruno leaving. He was obviously hurting and she feels she failed him because she couldn’t fix it.
That’s why she parents Mirabel the way she does. She sees a lot of her brother in her daughter and that’s why she tells Mirabel not lose her way in this family the same way her brother did.
She always tries to reassure her daughter that she is perfect, that she’s enough, just the way she is. She doesn’t have to try so hard. She showers them all, with unconditional love and affection. (Something Alma wasn’t very good at doing that much growing up.)
And as great as those things are it wasn’t always what her kids needed. She’s a caretaker, but she’s also very passive. Unlike her siblings, she’s the “unproblematic” one. “Señorita Perfecta” in that she avoids making waves and causing conflict. She tries to be a good daughter, and not give her mother a hard time. That’s what I think she has someone like Agustin for. A husband who stands by her and will firmly stand up for his family, and always support them, no matter what. And that’s exactly what he does. So yeah, I think she’s an amazing mom, and a great role model with her own flaws and problems just like everyone else.
Maybe I'm stupid for not noticing this sooner, but I was watching some Encanto clips on Youtube and it suddenly hit me— even without her powers, Luisa is still incredibly strong.
Like, it's easy to overlook because from the age of five onwards she basically never experienced the sensation of struggling to lift something apart from the weight of her family's expectations, so every scene where she tries without her powers she's miserable and freaking out about how 'weak' she is.
But if you look at it objectively:
Like, yeah, she's struggling and straining and all, but she's also moving a fucking piano from one room to another entirely by herself. Like, that's not normally a one person job.
Equally, here:
This is a huge slab of rock. And yeah, she requires Mirabel's help to get it upright, but she gets it most of the way there on her own, and Mirabel is fifteen and pushing from a side corner, so her support was probably more moral than physical anyway.
And here:
Now she's working with both Mirabel and Isabela's help, but Mirabel seems to be in charge of holding it steady rather than pulling it upright, and Isabela is not particularly muscular and looks to be bearing less of the weight, so there is no way that Luisa is not doing most of the work in lifting this massive fucking load-bearing column.
Once again, while Luisa clearly appreciates having her sisters help her, it's probably less that she can't lift stuff without her powers— I mean, don't go asking her to throw donkeys in the air or move a church without them, but she's still perfectly capable of heavy lifting— and more that she needs the confidence that comes with knowing that she's not the only one bearing the weight.
Another interesting thing is that the fact that Luisa's muscles persist even after losing her powers implies that even when she had them, she must have been feeling at least some of the weight of the things she lifted.
Like, muscles build with effort. Her powers obviously give her a boost, but if they just made everything weightless then she wouldn't have anything like the physique she's ended up with (in fact, she'd probably have been incredibly scrawny from not putting her muscles to use since she was five years old).
When she complains about being treated like a workhorse, it's not just the time and the stress of responsibility that she's got to be unhappy about. Muscles grow when they get damaged through exercise (which is why you might feel sore after a workout) and then repair themselves stronger than before. That's where the phrase 'no pain, no gain' comes from.
In order to have the kind of muscles that she has, Luisa has to have been experiencing at least some physical discomfort from using her power. Physical discomfort that probably didn't get acknowledged, because nobody would have been expecting her to feel it, and she most likely wouldn't have wanted to mention it too much, given her fear of being seen as weak.
Which means that one of the biggest benefits of having her sisters help her lift stuff, even if she's still doing most of the actual work, is that Luisa now has somebody there to acknowledge that the work she's doing is difficult. That it's not nothing to be told you have to lift a church, round up some donkeys and divert a river all on your own without even five minutes to take a break.
When the three of them finally lift that pillar, and Isabela turns to her admiringly and says "you're so strong!"— how many times before that do you think Luisa has been earnestly praised by members of her family for the work she does?
Mother and son shaped by trauma: a deeper look into Alma and Bruno's damaged relationship
Alma and Bruno's mother-son relationship seems like such a minor aspect of the movie, but when you give it some thought, despite the limited focus, it's not only a very complex relationship, but also a narratively significant one.
Obviously we don't have a lot of information on it, but let me reflect a bit on the things we do know, while trying to fill in some blanks. Long post ahead.
Back to the start - how did it go so wrong?
There's one particularly interesting detail that Jared Bush shared on a podcast some time ago. It mostly comes down to the reason Bruno's visions were usually so negative: because that's how he was taught to use his gift by his mother, who would ask him to look into the future for any possible dangers to their home.
Now, this makes perfect sense for Alma's character and gives a great insight into how her trauma affected her. It's a completely natural consequence of the tragedy she experienced - of course she would be gripped by fear and desperate to protect her home from another tragedy at all cost. And the power of foresight is seemingly the ultimate key to preventing tragedy, so of course she would rely on her child's gift for that...
...and yes, that's a great burden to put on your child's shoulders and something that clearly had troubling consequences. The particularly frustrating thing being that those consequences could have been largely prevented only if Bruno had proper understanding and emotional support.
The thing is...the understanding and support probably were there for some time. Some bonus materials suggest that Bruno was not always the black sheep of the family, but quite the opposite. He was apparently once the golden child of the family - until people began to believe his gift was actually responsible for bad future events.
Which brings me to the important question: why did it go so wrong? If Alma herself believed Bruno's gift could help prevent disaster, how and why did this belief that it's actually causing disaster came to be? Didn't she try to protect her son from his gift being horribly misunderstood?
Well, I'd like to give Alma the benefit of the doubt that she did try to protect him, at least when he was a child. But I do wonder if she simply grew exhausted by Bruno at some point, as he grew older? Exhausted by his unclear visions, which were hard to control and not that helpful after all (I think Dolores' verse in WDTAB kinda suggests it). Exhausted by Bruno's eccentric personality that was so far away from the "perfect image" she wanted for the family. And maybe that frustration led to her ultimately neglecting him emotionally and enabling the negative attitude to his gift, even if it wasn't intentional on her part.
Broken trust
Again, this is all just my interpretation and I don't want to assume the worst without any proof... however, I do think it's reasonable to believe that Alma did fail Bruno in some way.
And she might have not realized it, but I think Bruno himself very much felt she failed him. That would also explain his evident lack of trust in her. I talked in one of my previous posts how Bruno not trusting Alma with the vision about Mirabel is a big red flag that something was very wrong in the family. Ideally, he should have been able to trust his mother with the vision, but we were as far from the ideal scenario as we could be - Bruno choosing to hide the vision is a clear sign how damaged his relationship with his mother was at this point and how broken his trust in her was.
Ironically, if Bruno's decision was a result of broken trust in his mother...the same decision also broke her trust in him.
Let's look at it from her (sympathetic but misguided) perspective for a moment. Bruno's gift was something she had relied on in order to protect her family. And so many years later, no matter what the present attitude to his gift was, she still went to him in a difficult moment. So the fact that he essentially denied her that help would definitely feel like a huge betrayal - for Alma it probably looked like Bruno had betrayed the family and betrayed the miracle.
Those would be the understandable feelings of a traumatized woman who probably couldn't stand losing someone she loves yet again - believing Bruno betrayed and abandoned them because he doesn't care was likely a kind of coping mechanism to numb the grief.
Regardless of how understandable those feelings might be though, this coping mechanism was deeply unhealthy and harmful. What's more, the choice to paint Bruno as the bad guy shows horrible lack of self-awareness. And that lack of self-awareness only intensified the unhealthy environment in the family.
Because in the end, Bruno leaving the family should have been the wake-up call that the "perfect" family might have some issues to work through and something needs to change to avoid driving away anyone else. Alma might have not known Bruno's motives to leave, might have been understandably angry and hurt about him hiding the vision, but she definitely should have reflected on her own mistakes as a mother that led to Bruno making this decision.
Protecting the family and understanding the true miracle
But beyond how trauma shaped their relationship, I think there's something else at the core of the issue: their love for their family and their different understanding of what it means to protect it.
I talked about how Alma went to Bruno in a difficult moment, when she feared for the future of the miracle - and that the fact he never gave her the vision and simply ran away must have felt like a betrayal to the miracle.
In some way Bruno did betray the miracle - he betrayed the miracle in the way Alma understood the miracle at that point, as a source of magic more than anything else. And ironically, by doing so, Bruno showed that he actually understood what the miracle was truly about.
Alma was so fixated on protecting the miracle that she ended up losing sight of what was truly important and hurt the family. On the other hand, Bruno saw a threat to the miracle and yet still chose protecting his young niece's well being over anything else - one "giftless" little girl mattered more than the magic.
My point here isn't "Alma bad, Bruno good", that's a huge simplification. Both of those characters were very damaged and were going to unhealthy extremes to protect what was important to them. I'm not saying Bruno's decision to hide the vision was the "right" one or something to be glorified - I mostly think that it's a decision that should have never been made and again, the fact he felt he had to do that shows the deep rooted issues within the family.
But ultimately, he did have the right priority there - of course Mirabel's well being matters more than the magic. Every member of the family matters more than the magic. That's the whole point of the movie and the core of Alma's character arc - realizing that the family itself is the greatest gift.
And one detail I particularly like is that Alma and Bruno are the two people to tell Mirabel she's the real miracle in the end - it shows their values are finally on the same page and there's finally hope for mutual understanding between them.
so I finally watched Encanto. cue Madrigal feels bc what am I, if not on brand.
also please note, I’m a white, Slavic girl living in Central Europe so I probably didn’t get a lot of the Latinx subtext in the movie.
man, first of all, all of the Bruno feels.
Bruno must have had it so hard all his life. the only man in the family, he must have felt the pressure of supporting everyone. and the triplets presumably received their gifts at the same time and it must’ve been scary for each of them in different ways. Pepa obviously, because how do you ask a five-year-old to control their moods because a tantrum can cause a hurricane? Julieta is a different case because cooking is not an obvious gift, so maybe for a while she thought that her siblings got gifts but she didn’t?
and Bruno got future vision. at age 5. it must have been terrifying. no wonder he’s one bundle of anxiety.
I was wondering why Pepa and Julieta were rather late mothers, but now that I think of it, they must have been scared that their kids would get gifts as well. and these gifts would be just as scary.
Dolores and Isabela are both 21 which means Pepa and Julieta were both 29 when they had them. and man, while Isabella’s gift is innocent enough, Dolores’s is also kinda terrifying because imagine hearing all sorts of stuff at age 5. no wonder Julieta had her second child two years later (Luisa is 19) but Pepa waited 6 years (Camilo is 15) and then another 10 (Antonio is 5).
because Camilo’s gift is also kinda scary. Julieta’s daughters got off easy. Pepa’s children? not so much.
and then Mirabel got no gift at all. and she saw it as a bad thing, as did Alma, but you can’t tell me the triplets weren’t secretly a little grateful. Pepa and Bruno at least.
Antonio’s gift is scary too, when you think about it. I bet he is gonna convince everyone to become vegan, isn’t he?
but back to Bruno.
Alma’s trauma response was the expectation of perfection from her family. but man, what expectations she must have had from Bruno, who could never replace her Pedro but who must have felt like he should. like he should be the man of the family. on top of his scary visions. I kinda think his invention of Hernando and Jorge was a little bit trying to find a version of himself that was good enough for everyone when he felt he wasn’t.
think about how everyone thinks Bruno was mischievous, when in reality he was a nervous goofball.
his disappearance… one doesn’t make such a decision hastily. I can’t imagine him hiding in the walls on a whim. I can see him finding the hidden room and hiding out there as a child… and then, after Mirabel doesn’t get a gift and he has his last vision, he goes to his safe place and just… never leaves. the family has another Madrigal man with a gift in Camilo.
for some reason I don’t think Bruno got along well with either of his sisters’ husbands. Felix and Agustin are clearly in love with their wives and happy to take on a more supportive role in the family whereas Bruno probably think he ought to be the patriarch… when he’s anything but. he must’ve felt lonely.
I can’t stop thinking about the moment when Bruno starts saying “Sana sana colita de rana” while he jumps over the cracks on Casita.
That rhyme is used to comfort little kids when they get hurt, and Bruno reciting it, besides from hitting me with the waves of nostalgia, also melts my heart into a puddle…
Because! He is saying it to Casita! He fills himself with courage as he takes the name of Hernando, patches the cracks and tries to help Casita heal, he avoids the cracks ever so gently like you would be careful with a person’s wounds and then tries to comfort Casita the best way he can: by saying that little rhyme his mami recited so many times to him and his sisters when they were small children. It’s so sweet, a sweet act of love and care.
Probably me looking too closely at things again, but I just really enjoy this shot in Encanto:
Just before the close-up cuts away, you can see his face change from realization to determination, understanding what he has to do. It took an excessive amount of tries for me to screenshot it:
I miss hand drawn animation, but have to give serious kudos to CGI animators for their mastery of microexpressions.
The family & house are tied together. If the family has problems so does the house.
Cracks
- Visual representation of family problems.
- A “symptom” of the family’s dysfunction
And like the family, Casita internalizes these problems, presenting a perfect facade while she crumbles apart. We only see the extent of the damage when Mirabel enters the walls. But before we see the spackle, there’s something else broken inside their home:
The walls visibly bow away from the rift in the floor, split open. In a magical house, what else could it be, except the largest of the cracks? And what is the biggest break in the family, an actual rift?
It’s too large to patch. Bruno cannot mend it from inside the walls, cannot even try. And after the family sees Bruno’s last prophecy, while Alma is furious and much of the family is scapegoating Mirabel, Mirabel almost falls into that same crack. But when she calls for help, Bruno reaches out. And Mirabel hauls them both out of the hole in the walls.
