A magical house, filled with equally magical people. This one has super strength, that one can shapeshift, and another makes gorgeous flowers bloom wherever she goes. It seems like everyone in Encanto’s family has a special gift. Well, with one exception.
Disney has released the first teaser trailer for Encanto today. It’s an animated musical about the magical, charmed Casa Madrigal in Colombia where every member of the Madrigal family has a unique magical talent — save Mirabel (Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Stephanie Beatriz), a 15-year-old girl wearing glasses that put The Mitchells vs. the Machines’ Katie Mitchell to shame. Mirabel appears to be the only one in her family without a magical gift.
However, as you can see in the teaser, she’s not about to let that slow her down. “Mirabel is a really funny, loving character who also deeply yearns for something more,” Beatriz said in a statement. “She’s also not afraid to stand up for what she knows is right — something I love and relate to very much.
Encanto is helmed by Zootopia’s Jared Bush and Byron Howard, alongside Charise Castro Smith and Lin-Manuel Miranda. This marks Miranda’s first start-to-finish collaboration with a Disney animated project, as he was brought in to write the songs for Moana after the project was already well underway. In a previous interview with Gizmodo, the composer shared how he was excited for this film because of how much it stands out from other typical Disney animated musicals. Even though Mirabel is the protagonist, this movie is very much about the family working together and sticking by each other.
“One of the things that we really kind of all talked about — all the creators, Charise and Byron and Jared and I — we were like, ‘We really want to tell a family, an intergenerational family story with all the complexity that brings,’” Miranda said. “So often when you get into story mode, it turns into the hero and the quest — and you lose characters, then you lose complexity because everything becomes the quest. And I think what’s been thrilling about this is, since that’s been our mission statement, it’s been really fun to sort of write, you know, musical family dynamics in a really fun and complicated way. I’m really excited for the world to finally see it.”
Encanto arrives in theatres sometime this spring.