Encanto premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood on November 3, 2021, and reached U.S. theaters on November 24 for a 30-day run. It grossed $261.3 million worldwide against a $120–150 million budget. By the usual math, that is a disappointment. By the math that actually matters here, it is a footnote.
Trailer, via Walt Disney Animation Studios.
The Candle and the House Called Casita
The film opens with an armed conflict that forces Pedro and Alma Madrigal to flee their village in Colombia with their infant triplets, Julieta, Pepa and Bruno. Pedro is killed. The candle Alma carries gains a magical power that repels the attackers and creates Casita, a sentient house in a realm bordered by mountains. Fifty years later, a village thrives under that candle’s protection.
Every Madrigal descendant receives a “gift” at age five, and each gift is put to work for the villagers. Julieta heals. Pepa controls weather. Luisa has superhuman strength. Bruno sees the future, and was vilified and scapegoated for it until he disappeared ten years before the film’s present.
Mirabel, Julieta’s youngest daughter, got nothing. No gift, no ceremony that took. She is the ordinary one in a family of walking miracles, and the film is smart enough to make that the engine rather than the joke.
Mirabel Sees the Cracks
At Antonio’s fifth-birthday celebration — Pepa’s youngest son, granted the ability to talk to animals — the Madrigals unwittingly leave Mirabel out of a family photo. Then she sees Casita cracking and the candle’s flame flickering. She raises the alarm. Casita repairs itself. Nobody believes her.
That night she overhears Alma lament the candle’s fading, and resolves to fix it herself. Luisa, whose strength has been faltering, admits she feels overwhelmed by the constant obligation to help the villagers. She points Mirabel toward Bruno’s room, a forbidden tower inside Casita.
Mirabel finds a cave holding pieces of Bruno’s last vision, made of opaque emerald. The family warns her off. She reassembles the pieces anyway and sees herself standing in front of a cracking Casita.
This is the film’s best structural move. The prophecy does not name a villain or a fix. It names Mirabel, and the question of whether she is the cure or the cause hangs over the entire second act.
Stephanie Beatriz, John Leguizamo and the Madrigal Voices
The cast is deep and specifically chosen. Stephanie Beatriz voices Mirabel; her father is Colombian. John Leguizamo, born in Bogotá, voices Bruno. Wilmer Valderrama, who spent his childhood in Colombia where his mother is from, voices Agustín.
María Cecilia Botero plays Abuela Alma. Diane Guerrero is Isabela, Jess Darrow is Luisa, Carolina Gaitán is Pepa, Angie Cepeda is Julieta, Mauro Castillo is Félix, Rhenzy Feliz is Camilo, Adassa is Dolores, and Ravi Cabot-Conyers is Antonio.
Beatriz carries the film. Mirabel is on screen for nearly all of it, and the performance never tips into the twee or the self-pitying. Leguizamo’s Bruno is the other anchor — a man who has been made into a family curse and has quietly accepted the role.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Songs and Germaine Franco’s Score
Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the original songs. Germaine Franco composed the original orchestral score. The film is a musical fantasy comedy, and the songs do the emotional work the 102-minute runtime cannot always afford.
The music is also where the film’s cultural fidelity is most audible. Reviews singled out the music, the animation, the voice acting, the characterization, the emotional depth and the cultural fidelity, and named magic realism among the film’s concerns. That is not decoration. The magic in Encanto behaves like magic realism — it is domestic, generational, and tied to a house and a family rather than to a quest.
The Toucan Alan Tudyk Voiced
Here is a detail worth keeping. Alan Tudyk, considered Disney’s good-luck charm, makes a cameo as Pico, a toucan. There was no obvious role for him. The Madrigals are Colombian and Mirabel has no animal sidekick. So he became a bird.
When Tudyk first entered the recording studio, he told the crew their scratch vocals for Pico were not toucans at all. They were parrots. He spent many hours imitating various toucans. The team would speak to him in English, and he would answer in toucan noises.
That is a small thing. It is also the whole method of the movie in miniature: somebody cared enough to get the bird right.
The Box Office Number and the Disney+ Number
Encanto underperformed at the box office. That is stated plainly, and $261.3 million against a $120–150 million budget supports it. Then it hit Disney+ on December 24, 2021, and became a ratings success.
The theatrical run was 30 days. The film was also released in RealD 3D, Dolby Cinema, 2D and D-BOX formats. None of that saved the opening. What saved the film was the thing the industry still struggles to price: a family watching it together at home, repeatedly, and then again the next week.
This is the part worth watching. A 30-day window and a Christmas Eve streaming drop turned a soft performer into a phenomenon, and the trades have been arguing about what that means ever since.
What Encanto Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
The ranking of what works, roughly:
- The songs — Miranda’s strongest set for an animated film, and the reason the film outlived its opening weekend.
- Mirabel — a protagonist defined by what she lacks, which is harder to write than a protagonist defined by what she can do.
- The family structure — a matriarch, three generations, and a house that is literally a character.
- The animation — vibrant, warm, and specific about place.
- The third act — the most conventional stretch, and the one that leans hardest on reconciliation the film has not quite earned.
The weaknesses are real. The middle sags under exposition. Bruno’s ten-year absence is resolved faster than it deserves. And the film’s central metaphor — that a family’s pressure to be exceptional can crack the foundation — is stated more often than it is dramatized.
But the emotional depth is not a marketing line. Alma’s grief, Luisa’s exhaustion, Isabela’s performance of perfection: these land because the film lets them be ugly before it lets them be fixed.
Encanto is not a perfect film. It is a film with a clear point of view about family, obligation and the cost of being the one who got nothing, and it holds that point of view for 102 minutes without blinking. That is rarer than the box office suggests.
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