Lin-Manuel Miranda Shares Details on His Animated Disney Musical ENCANTO
Disney recently announced a new animated musical film titled Encanto, which is coming from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Charise Castro Smith, and Zootopia’s Jared Bush and Byron Howard.
During a recent interview with io9, Miranda shared some details on the film explaining that it “takes you to Colombia, where a magical family live in a magical home.” One of the unique aspects of the story is that it centers around an “intergenerational family,” not just one or two characters who leave their families to embark on an adventure.
Miranda went on to say that the creative team’s goal was to “create a family-friendly story that’s actually about a family.” He added. “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. 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.”
This project has been in development since 2016, and Miranda has been involved with it from its conception. This isn’t an experience he’s had with the other Disney films that he’s been involved with. He shared, “The biggest difference is that I’ve been able to be sort of in since the ground floor. With Moana, I was kind of the last guy hired. And they were really a couple of years into the development of the story before I started working on it.”
Miranda says that working on the film has been a fulfilling experience for him and he’s still in the process of writing the music for it.
Encanto will be Disney's 60th animated feature film, and it will hit theaters on November 24th, 2021.