Encanto Review: 7 Ups & 3 Downs

6. It Tackles Mature, Ambitious Themes

While Encanto is focused on the broad theme of family as most all Disney movies are, it goes much further than that and examines it through the specific lens of Colombia's cultural past.

The dramatic crux of the story is centered around generational trauma, and how a victim can become blinded by their anguish and inadvertantly inflict that pain upon their descendents.

It's certainly a heavy and unexpectedly ambitious theme for a cute and colourful Disney animation of all things to tackle, and while hardly a deep-dive meditation on the subject, adds depth and shade to what could so easily have been a simple crowd-pleasing story about a magical family.

As the stories Disney tells continue to become more diverse, it makes sense that they tackle throughlines which have been generally under-explored by filmmakers to date. This is an encouraging step in the right direction to that end.