Disney's Encanto!

[Ben]

On the shoot I am on at the moment, we have a crew member called Bruno. You can guess what literally keeps on being sung…

[James]

Silenzio Bruno?

[Randall]

SHHHH! We don't talk about him.

I'm not surprised the song was not put forward. It's basically a catchy but unremarkable tune, which relates directly to the film's story. It wouldn't seem to really lend itself to being a stand-alone hit, on the surface.

[Ben]

Xactly.

[gaastra]

Encanto confirmed one of the biggest films on disney plus!

Also EVERY song on encanto soundtrack is in the billboards top 100! (all of them!) Also we don't talk about bruno now playing on radio stations! Now you really can't escape it!

https://screenrant.com/encanto-every-so ... 100-chart/

[gaastra]

Heading back to theatres.

https://wdwnt.com/2022/02/disneys-encan ... -theaters/

[Daniel]

Time for Turning Red to turn redder.

[Ben]

[Daniel]

"Disney's Haunted By Your Tragic Past Mansion" hehe. Clever lyrics!

[EricJ]

It's basically a catchy but unremarkable tune, which relates directly to the film's story. It wouldn't seem to really lend itself to being a stand-alone hit, on the surface.

Bumping the thread for opinions, as I'm working my way through the Pandemic Seven:

And no, not the usual complaint*--This time, since I put it ahead on the list as I was finally trying to figure out what it was with the danged Bruno thing already, the complaint turned out to be about Lin-Manuel Miranda replacing Kristen Lopez as the New Disney-Darling House Composer.
To paraphrase the old concert-pianist saying, he can play the notes, but he can't play the musical. He certainly goes overboard trying to make the tunes sound Latin, and in making the lyrics rhyme at all cost, but he doesn't have a sense of catchy melody, or using the songs to open up or propel the action. I watched Hamilton, and to this day I couldn't remember one of the songs if I tried. (Assuming it had more than one, it was hard to tell.)

It struck me not during That @#$% Song, but during the earlier song where beefy Luisa sings about "Pressure": It's one of Miranda's songs where nothing actually happens except that a character is expositorily explaining something very simple in three to five minutes. We get a nice, colorful surreal music-video illustrating her lyrics, but at the end of the number, the characters are LITERALLY in the same spot as where they started...Because without the fantasy scene, all they really did was talk. That's what basically happened with Maui singing "You're Welcome" to Moana, but just because it's catchy didn't mean we're any closer to Point B, or that we're not thinking "So what the heck just happened?"--Compare this with, say, the more Broadway-esque number of Mother Goethel singing "Mother Knows Best" to Rapunzel in Tangled, which didn't even leave the same room and still feels a much more dynamic number.
We get assaulted with "La Familia Madrigal", but which opening expository character-introduction montage stuck more clearly in your brain afterwards, Mirabelle's, Belle's from "Belle", or "The Bells of Notre Dame"?

Basically, with Miranda's doggerel lyrics, Disney's Chi-Chi's-like attempt to replicate faux "Latin" culture by making everything sound like salsa, and a plucky heroine trying to understand her family's ancient secrets while hugging her abuela...did anyone else feel like they were watching a really LONG episode of "Elena of Avalor"?
The winged jaguars would not be out of place.

----
* - During the combined Encanto/Turning Red mania, one media columnist wrote a clearly fangirls-rool piece on "Disney's new Post-Villain phase", as if Moana and Luca were also both intentional, and, of course, Because Frozen.
Put it this way: Does anyone want to see a new version of Lion King where, thanks to Simba's warmth and importance of family, Scar finally has his breakthrough and sobs on Simba's shoulder, "I tried so hard to live up to my brother's image, and only pushed myself away!...All those years, he had everything and I had nothing! "?

[Farerb]

Eric, I agree with everything you've just said except one thing - You're Welcome introduce us to Maui, who is a main character that we're going to spend time with for the rest of the movie, while Luisa drifts back into being a background character and that's the difference between these two songs, for me anyway.

[Ben]

Yes, I get that you don't like Moana or You're Welcome, but by the end of the song, we know all about Maui, his backstory, reason for being there, reason for wanting to get away, befriending and duping Moana, and nabbing a boat and escaping the island by the end of it, and which point he's not even on the same *land mass*…!

Encanto, on the other hand, merely excels at stopping everything every ten minutes to introduce a new character and just tell us all about *them*, to the detriment of anything else: story is not progressed and, worse, what we learn about the characters each time brings very little needed information to propel the plot or, worse again, give us anything that will come back as important later on. It’s basically a revue show of people that live in a crazy house that’s, basically, had enough of its inhabitants as we have by the end of the evening!

[James]

he can play the notes, but he can't play the musical.

I have a very similar complaint about his lyrics, as mentioned in the Moana review:

Some of them didn’t seem very lyrical. More like someone just randomly singing what is happening, without regard to making it musical... It’s the difference between singing, “This song is from an old story that has been told for a long time” vs “Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme”.

[Randall]

Yeah. Prose vs. poetry, and without the effort to fit the words with the music.

[EricJ]

I'll give Miranda credit for "Mary Poppins Returns". (Although, yes, those didn't move the plot any forward either, but then, there was no plot besides just doing a fan-revue of individual scenes from the first movie.)

While he tried to write black-rap for "Hamilton" and salsa for "Encanto" and "In the Heights", for Mary, Disney put Lin on a leash to write old-school Sherman Bros. type songs, and...while I still can't remember anything from Hamilton or Moana, I'll find myself humming "Can You Imagine That?" or still going mushy at "The Place Where Lost Things Go".
That's the power of Mainstream, and it takes a pro to appreciate it, which is the one reason Broadway's struggling so badly at the moment. Both animation and Broadway are trying to get out from under the crushing weight of Fan Gentrification, that tries so hard to be "For us by us" for a limited group, it hasn't learned the ability to be something for everybody.