Finally, Disney offers up a role model heroine who isn’t a princess

Encanto proves that showtunes will always be a hit and interesting, empathetic characters don’t need to leap buildings in a single bound, writes

Kevin Maher.

JUST in the nick of time: a spectacular, all-singing, all-dancing Disney cartoon that finally addresses the elephant in the multiplex for the modern film fan. Superhero movies, it says, are inherently problematic! At least it says that for most of the running time. Only if you leave just before the last, slightly compromised sequence will you enjoy the full power of the polemic.

The focus of the film is a flamboyant Colombian family called the Madrigals, who live in an enormous country mansion (think the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning from X-Men) and possess an array of alarmingly familiar ‘‘gifts’’.

Luisa Madrigal (Jessica Darrow) has super-strength, like the Hulk, and can lift entire houses with one hand. Pepa Madrigal (Carolina Gaitan), like Storm in X-Men, can control the weather. Camilo (Rhenzy Feliz) is a shapeshifter like Mystique; Isabella (Diane Guerrero) controls flowers like Poison Ivy from Batman, and Julieta (Angie Cepeda) has the power to heal others of their wounds. Like, I dunno, Jesus?

At the centre of this busy yet isolated world (they’re hidden

from the rest of Colombia by a circular mountain range) is star protagonist and show-tune belter Mirabel Madrigal (Stephanie Beatriz from TV’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine).

The movie-makers, including Charise Castro Smith and LinManuel Miranda, revel in the fact that she has no superpowers at all. The magical ether was disturbed during her childhood, so Mirabel, unlike her siblings, was left only with a quirky, imperfect and slightly cerebral sense of fun.

As the film progresses

– and a family curse is unleashed – the Madrigals are suddenly forced to face the prospect of lives without super skills, which means a drastic diminution in their status as local overlords – they are essentially worshipped by the Colombian mortals around them, and part of the nuance in the narrative is in the notion that the Madrigals are de facto colonial elitists falling, before

Encanto will be released in New Zealand on Thursday ‘This is a radical departure for the Disney message machine. Mirabel wears glasses and has curly hair as well as an above-average capacity for self-reflection.’

our very eyes, on hard times. And what are superheroes anyway, the film implies, other than pumped-up neofascist elitists?

The unexceptional Mirabel, meanwhile,

only rises in stature as those around her flail towards insignificance.

And whether she’s belting through some sternum-rattling ballads (Waiting on a Miracle is her Let It Go) or rescuing a distant relative from the hidden depths of the house, she is a consistent reminder to Marvelwashed audiences that interesting, empathetic characters don’t need to leap buildings in a single bound.

In fact they don’t need to be exceptional in any way, human or otherwise. This is a radical departure for the Disney message machine. Mirabel wears glasses and has curly hair as well as an above-average capacity for self-reflection.

But, unlike the protagonists of the recent hits Luca and Soul, she’s not nurturing some secret creative talent, and not desperate to express some inner longing that marks her out as exceptional. She’s simply a girl who’s kind of fun, and dorky too.

The tunes are also a step up for the Hamilton creator, Miranda, who has struggled to make a sizeable impact on cinema (In the Heights and Tick Tick . . . Boom! are just, well, nice). The songs, all his, are built lyrically around that rolling sense of hip-hop rhythm that defined the best Hamilton tracks. The strongest here is Surface Pressure, a driving rap anthem about paranoia sung by Luisa (she fears the end of her strength) that contains several fabulous show-off lines such as, ‘‘Under the surface/ I feel berserk as a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus/ Under the surface/ Was Hercules ever, like, ‘Yo I don’t wanna fight Cerberus?’ ‘‘

As the film reaches its climax Mirabel’s grandmother Alma (Maria Cecilia Botero) adds deeper historical context to the tale, the metaphors become apparent, and we’re suddenly in the world of Leftist guerrillas, Right-wing extremists and ethnic cleansing (lightly touched upon, of course).

It ends with a tear-drenched, happy-clappy U-turn (this is Disney, after all), but the impression is of an original jaunt with tap-along tunes. This is a film with a muscular sense of its own identity, which, thankfully, doesn’t involve spandex and capes.