The Miracle and the Brand

Abstract

Disney’s “magic” is both a brand term and a viewerly experience: an affective promise, cultivated through the Disney musical, that animation can make the world feel more coherent, hospitable, and loveable than it ordinarily does. Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Encanto (2021) makes this promise newly explicit by placing “the magic” at the center of its plot. This article reads the film as a reflexive meditation on Disney magic and a staging of the costs of attachment to it from within the Disney form. Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of the idol, the icon, and the gift provides a conceptual apparatus for tracking how the miracle becomes administered, and how Encanto both diagnoses and renovates Disney enchantment. The film’s selective use of magical realism places its family story within a Colombian history of displacement, and helps keep in view what is lost when this history is gathered into a story of family reconciliation. Encanto emerges as a moment when Disney attends, with unusual candor, to the promise and cost of its own brand.