“When I was growing up, nothing like that existed, and so to be part of the team that brought that into the world was something I knew I had to do.”Ĭharise Castro Smith’s first professional play was staged at Portland’s Milagro Theatre. “I just jumped at the opportunity to work on this because it’s the first Latinx Disney musical,” says co-director and co-screenwriter Charise Castro Smith, a first-generation Cuban American. The songs he wrote were orchestrated and arranged by composer Germaine Franco, while fellow Chicana Yvett Merino is a producer on the film. Other Latino luminaries rounded out the crew behind the scenes, starting with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican descent. Meanwhile, Wilmer Valderrama, who voices Mirabel’s father, Agustín, spent time as a child in Colombia, where his mother is from.

Beatriz’s father is Colombian, and John Leguizamo, who was born in the country’s capital of Bogota, plays her character’s uncle Bruno. Raising Our Voices: How the Artisans of 'Blue Bayou' Redefined American Identityĭisney cast talent with Colombian roots to give voice to the Madrigals. Each member of the family has been blessed with an exceptional gift, save for Mirabel (voiced by Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Stephanie Beatriz), whom audiences might view as the sharpest of the bunch but is not considered special by the family matriarch, Abuela Alma (voiced by Colombian television veteran María Cecilia Botero and sung by In the Heights‘ Olga Merediz), and is therefore taken for granted. Moana was rooted in Polynesian mythology, Raya and the Last Dragon grounded its inspiration in Southeast Asian folklore and, now, Encanto finds its setting in South America.Ī magical realist ode to unconditional love and family values forged in hardship, the animated film centers on the Madrigal clan - proud Colombians who, due to a miracle, live in an enchanted house set in a fairy-tale landscape. In recent years, Disney Animation increasingly has turned to cultures that the nearly-century-old studio seldom has explored to tell stories more representative of the real world, even as they are infused with Disney’s signature magic.

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