Interview with ‘Encanto’ Directors Jared Bush & Charise Castro Smith
This year marks the 60th animated film to be released from Disney Animation Studios with Encanto, a musical that celebrates Colombian culture, magic and above all, family. The film is out now at cinemas and will make its way to Disney Plus in time for the Christmas holidays, so that children of all ages and adults will surely enjoy together.
I was fortunate to speak with both Jared Bush and Charise Castro Smith, who are the directors and writers of Encanto alongside Byron Howard.
How did the film evolve from concept to production and how did you reach the theme of family?
Jared: Wow. Well, you know, it’s funny. It’s been five years this month that we started working on this project and Byron Howard and I were working on Zootopia. We are both musicians. We love musicals and we knew we wanted to tell a story through music as our next project. I just finished writing Moana with Lin-Manuel Miranda and he said, “I want to do another musical, but I want this one to be set in Latin America.” So the first thing that we had to do is really talk about what the story is about, what are we very emotionally connected to. And in speaking to each other, we realised we all had large, extended families. And maybe these large, extended families were great and a little complicated and that’s something that we decided that’s what we want to tell a story about.
So we started to research our own families and very quickly, we realised we actually didn’t know our families as well as we thought we did. That these people that we grew up with, you know, like my mom. I know my mom as my mom, not as a person. And I realised, oh, there’s all these parts to her that I didn’t know. And that’s every member of my family, and we talked to each other and everyone’s family kind of felt the same way. So this notion of family and perspective was really our true north and over the five years the story evolved quite a bit, but that true north of family and perspective always remain the same.
While developing the characters, who did you resonate with the most while writing the script?
Jared: Mirabel is very close to my heart. I’ve always loved that she is kind of a unique Disney heroine in that she’s so vulnerable and awkward and human and relatable. And of course Stephanie Beatriz did such an incredible job bringing her to life. She really got all the humour and pathos and vulnerability. It’s a great performance not to mention she has an incredible voice as well. So I feel very close to her.
Charise: Well, you know, it’s funny, Mirabel is definitely close to my heart as well. I think my whole life I’ve had self-worth issues and that’s something that her character really goes up against. She’s this one ordinary character surrounded by extraordinary people. And I think a lot of us, certainly now with social media, look around and it’s very easy to question, whether you belong, whether you can measure up, and so I’d say definitely Mirabel is very close to me.
A different side of me is Augustin, who is the Dad. He’s maybe somewhat awkward, maybe he tries to do a good job as a dad, maybe doesn’t always nail it. So I’d say there’s a part of me in Augustin as well.
COLOMBIA, MI ENCANTO – In Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 60th feature film “Encanto,” Mirabel Madrigal lives with her extended family in the mountains of Colombia in a wondrous, charmed place called an Encanto. As the only child in her extraordinary family who’s not blessed with magical powers, Mirabel is determined to prove that she belongs, setting out on a grand adventure within the walls of her home. Opening in the U.S. on Nov. 24, 2021, “Encanto” features Stephanie Beatriz as the voice of Mirabel and original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. © 2021 Disney. All Rights Reserved.
Jared, what was it like to work with Lin-Manuel Miranda again after your collaboration as writer and song writer on Moana?
Jared: Honestly, it’s a dream to work with Lin-Manuel. He has such an amazing, brilliant talent on top of the fact that he’s super, super collaborative. To have a partner as we’re trying to figure out characters, how to musicalize. This movie has 12 main characters, which is insane and I want to musicalize all of them and to really get to know them was really, really exciting. I think the key difference on this versus Moana is Lin was part of this movie from day one. So five years ago, he was our partner on this, we knew that we wanted to tell this story about family and to have your songwriter and your creative partner be with you from the beginning really changes quite a lot. We could think about the movie truly as a musical from the beginning, so on Moana both he and I joined a project about two years before it ended. So we were sort of coming in trying to figure out how to tell that story and musicalize it but this was very different. It was really organically built into the bones and the structure of the movie from the outset.
You also previously worked with Byron Howard as directors on Zootropolis. What was it like to work with him again?
Jared: Byron is one of my favourite people of all time. He hired me on Zootopia, 10 years ago, and he was like my long lost brother. We’re very, very similar. We have very similar sensibilities and he’s just the most kind, pleasant person to work with. So my experience on Zootrpolis was fantastic. Because he’s so collaborative and just wants to have fun and have a good time and he’s visually amazing. He really loves deep character dynamics and those emotions, but also just bringing that entertainment value. So that’s definitely something as we jumped into this project that we wanted to do the same.
I think that the key difference this time around is that this is really a movie about perspective and seeing things differently. So I think for Byron and I we knew for this movie that we needed a perspective outside of our own and so that’s where Charise comes in, because we realised we needed help. We need a smart person who can do this and we were very lucky to also work with Charise. You get to know each other really, really, really well. These movies are therapy. So I’ve had 10 years of therapy with Byron, I’ve now had almost four years of therapy with Charise.
In Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto,” Antonio may be shy, but his huge heart is his biggest asset—rivaled only by his newly received magical ability to communicate with animals. Directed by Byron Howard (“Zootopia,” “Tangled”) and Jared Bush (co-director “Zootopia”), co-directed by Charise Castro Smith (writer “The Death of Eva Sofia Valdez”) and produced by Clark Spencer and Yvett Merino, “Encanto” opens in theaters on Nov. 24, 2021. © 2021 Disney. All Rights Reserved.
Charise, after your work writing for huge television hits like The Haunting on Hill House and The Exorcist, how did you get onboard a Disney film?
Charise: That is a great question. So my background was as a playwright, and as you said, as a TV writer, a producer and actually, my agents had sent this really creepy, spooky play that I wrote to Disney Animation. And somehow this play about a family being eaten by the house from the inside basically got me a job working on a children’s animated film.
I think that I’m really interested in telling stories that have high emotional and personal stakes, but then have some fantastical kind of element that kind of pushes them into something more imaginative, but always really interested in stories being relationship and character driven.
And as a Latinx writer, how important was it to write a story set in Colombia?
Charise: We did a ton of research over the time that we were working on this movie, which was so critical to making the movie what it was. We had the Columbian Cultural Trust, which is a group of architects and designers and cultural experts and filmmakers, who we met on a weekly basis. They were reviewing all the scenes, looking at the script, really helping us dive in and understand how we can make the movie more and more specific to that beautiful, vibrant country. And I’ll say more generally myself coming from a Cuban American background, it’s so special to me that this family represents the diversity that exists within a lot of Latin X families and that we don’t really get to see on screen so it’s a really exciting component of this movie.
MEET MIRABEL – Welcome to the family Madrigal where every child is blessed with a magic gift unique to them. Everyone, that is, except Mirabel. Voiced by Stephanie Beatriz, Mirabel is determined to prove she belongs within this extraordinary family. Opening in the U.S. on Nov. 24, 2021, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto” features songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. © 2021 Disney. All Rights Reserved.
Encanto is in cinemas 24th November 2021.
Also read: Interview with ‘Encanto’ producer Clark Spencer.