“Pressure like a grip, grip, grip and it won’t let go, whoa,” she sings. She means this both physically and emotionally, as Luisa’s superpower is superstrength, and also because Lin-Manuel Miranda isn’t a subtle lyricist. In “ Surface Pressure,” Encanto’s catchiest tune, one of the Madrigal sisters, Luisa, sings about the pressure-so much pressure-to be strong for the whole family. As in, move their bodies in time to music, often for no better reason than that they can. Far more sophisticated, I think, to critique the second, less-talked-about pressure faced by a poor film like Encanto, the story of a magical Colombian family losing its magic: the pressure, specifically on its characters, to dance. Alas, the pressure to end happiestly is so totalizing in American animation that to complain about it now, in the 21st century, feels both dweeby and absurd. The happiest ending, never acceptable, is one in which every last disappointment or injustice or regret is, at the very last moment, vanquished as if by-if not literally by-magic, robbing the audience of the opportunity to sit with the beautiful, aching feelings they’d been preparing to sit with the whole time. ![]() ![]() Not happily, mind you happy endings are acceptable. The first is the pressure to end happiestly. Encanto, Disney’s latest animated musical, would’ve been a perfect little movie, had two pressures not been exerted on it.
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