Showing posts with label #Encanto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Encanto. Show all posts

Sunday, 15 May 2022

A utopia in a woke world?

Encanto (2021)
Director: Jared Bush and Byron Howard

Something is unsettling about this Disney animated musical. Sure the animation, the colour, and the music are spellbinding; it is the story that makes me think.

When I overanalyse the story, the more I feel it must surely be a wet dream for the proponents of the woke culture (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it). Colombians running from their motherland from atrocities (which they think were perpetrated by the US) were ushered in almost magically into a land of magic. In this magical land (the US, maybe), they were all given special powers (read special preference) to help each other in a Colombian only community. Perhaps others (non-Colombians) do not matter.

The next generation all grow up expecting to have special treatment - all the siblings and their siblings. They feel entitled to be treated differently. They deserve the magic that their predecessors received, even though their circumstances were different.

When these doors are not opened, they feel cheated and refuse to do their duty to the community. The community also needs to be blamed, for when someone reminds them of the rotten system and their imminent collapse, he is labelled as a traitor, an outcast, and put in cold storage. For a bit of semblance of sanity to prevail, the whole rot has to be purged away for new building blocks to be put in.

Maybe in not so your face manner, this musical tells the story of a matriarch who flees Colombia to be saved by a magic candle that builds a house for them and nurtures her children and grandchildren. The family and the rest of the community surrounding the shape-shifting mansion just make merry and dance all day through, unaware of the decay in the house's structure. The protagonist, a teenage girl who does not get her dues, goes on a crusade to find the real gift that she duly deserves.

Of course, it is not like that. Mind my wild imaginations! Did I mention the many biracial couples and the fleet of seemingly clueless and docile male characters? They form the woke narrative - payback time for all the toxic masculinity over the generations!

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