How Encanto Fixes The Disney Twist Villain Cliche

How Encanto Fixes The Disney Twist Villain Cliche

Disney’s Encanto is the latest Disney movie to use their twist villain cliche, but it uses it in a way that greatly improves on the formula.

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How Encanto Fixes The Disney Twist Villain Cliche

Warning: Contains spoilers for Encanto!

The latest Disney movie, Encanto, is another in a long line of Disney and Pixar movies to utilize a twist villain, but the way it handles that twist is a vast improvement on its predecessors. While having a twist villain isn’t unique to Disney, they’ve used the idea enough times, especially in recent years, for it to be seen as a specific cliche of theirs. Encanto does it as well, but the way it handles it changes the basic formula enough to make it stand out.

Many Disney and Pixar movies have employed a villain twist in their stories where someone who is initially portrayed as a friend of the main characters is suddenly revealed to be the main antagonist near the end of the movie, sometimes with a red herring for a large part of the story included. Many people have come to criticize Disney and Pixar for how often they use twist villains in their stories, especially with how often it’s been used in their more modern movies such as Zootopia, Big Hero 6, Coco, Incredibles 2, and both Frozen and Frozen 2; there were older movies to use the twist such as Toy Story 2 and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, but it was the newer ones that cemented it as a problem for people. The constant use of the twist villain cliche has made many of their movies come across as predictable and uninspired. Since the twist doesn’t come out until the end of the movie, there’s often very little time spent allowing the villain, both the twist villain and original red herring, to come across as anything more than an unsympathetic jerk.

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Encanto is another Disney movie to use the villain twist cliche, but it does so in a way that fixes many of the problems that its predecessors have had with it. Like other Disney and Pixar movies, Encanto has a red herring for its main antagonist in Bruno Madrigal, Mirabel’s uncle, with the gift of seeing into the future. The movie builds him up as an antagonist by always depicting him in a creepy manner. The song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” paints him as a sinister man who uses his gift to lock people in terrible futures, making it easy enough to see him as the villain, which, in turn, would make it easy enough to see him as a red herring. Sure enough, the Encanto character Bruno is a red herring. However, unlike older examples that were still villainous in their own right, Bruno is a nice person treated badly because of his gift. He plays a crucial part in helping Mirabel save the Casita and deal with the story’s true villain, Abuela Alma.

Alma is the movie’s true villain, the Disney twist villain of Encanto, and just like Bruno, her portrayal is vastly different from her contemporaries. Unlike other Disney twist villains, Alma has no intention of harming anyone; her status as a villain largely stems from her being antagonistic through how she looks down on Encanto’s protagonist Mirabel for not having a gift and puts pressure on the rest of the family to be perfect role models for the village. But even that came about from her wanting to honor the magic that protected her family decades prior. Regardless, the buildup of those negative emotions is why the Casita is falling apart, and everyone in the family is losing their gifts. Still, she’s immediately resentful for her part in all of it and quickly makes amends with her family, a far cry from what any other Disney twist villain would do.

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While Encanto does end up using the Disney villain twist cliche, its execution is completely different from other examples. Both the twist villain and the red herring are sympathetic, and not even the main antagonist is truly a villainous character, with everything being an accident brought about by tragic circumstances. Thanks to that, a tired cliche is able to regain a sense of effectiveness.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/encanto-villain-disney-twist-cliche-fix-bruno-alma/

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