A Look Inside Disney’s Encanto: SCAD Savannah Film Festival

The 2021 Savannah Film Festival was full of exciting screenings and enriching panels with directors, actors, and SCAD alumni. RenderQ’s editors covered several of the most exciting events regarding Digital Media over the course of this past week. One of the most fun panels was A Look Inside Disney’s Encanto, hosted this past Thursday, October 28, at 11 am. During this Film Fest Event, participants had the opportunity of having an exclusive look at the new upcoming animated Disney movie: Encanto. This movie is about a Hispanic Colombian family that lives in a magical place called Encanto. Their magic home granted gifts to all of the Madrigal family members, all except for the protagonist, Mirabel. However, even though Mirabel is not “special,” she is the family’s last hope as she finds out that the magic within her home is in danger.

     During this event, Jared Bush, director, and writer of this animated film guided the audience through the process, challenges, and inspiration when creating this fascinating movie. He began the presentation by sharing the focus of the story. This film narrates a connection with families, answering the following fundamental question of the story: How much do we know our families, and how much do our families know us? Perspective and understanding were the aspects that grounded the magical tale of Encanto, pushing forward a relatable story that all families can view themselves in.

Traveling overseas from the creative city of Burbank to the colorful country of Colombia, filmmakers got inspired and collected information from areas of high spirituality known as “Encantos” (hence the title of the film). Jared mentioned that a critical aspect of this film is magical realism, which is characteristic of Colombian literature. Colombian authors like Gabriel García Márquez used reality and fantasy to push forward their stories. This research trip also helped with the realistic aspect of the film. The team used architecture and the colorful culture as a reference to reflect realism in the characters and environments of the movie. In addition, this research trip to Colombia inspired the wonderful Lin Manuel Miranda to develop this animated film’s lyrics and music. 

After presenting the sneak peek of Encanto and going over the research trip, Jared Bush answered questions from Entertainment Weekly and the audience. He mentioned that one of the biggest challenges was balancing magical realism and realism, truth, and emotion. Another of the challenges the team had to face was that the setting within this movie is a character as well. Animators had a lot of work as they had to animate and tell the story of characters based on their unique personalities while at the same time animating a magical house that is a character itself. They also had to balance the story, the diversity, and the variety of characters, while not losing the essence of Colombian representation within the performance of each animation.

This fantastic animated movie is the 60th Walt Disney Animation Film. Encanto will be released exclusively in Theaters on November 24. So make sure to buy those tickets, as soon as possible. Encanto is a film that nobody should miss.