How Encanto Uses Lyrical Form as Characterization

It is, quite literally, show, don’t tell

Disney’s newest movie, Encanto, has taken over everywhere (and rightfully so, if you ask me.) Naturally, this has led to an explosion in articles and videos explaining the phenomenon, and why exactly Lin-Manuel Miranda is so good at what he does musically. I’ve seen videos of visual clues to the storyline you might miss on a first watch, and Howard Ho, my favorite analyst of all things music, is working on an excellent series talking about how the music in Encanto works to make us feel things.

What I haven’t seen much of is analyzing the lyrics themselves, specifically through a characterization lens. My background is in songwriting — I wanted to be a lyricist even before Taylor Swift was famous — and I’ve spent a decade editing novels since then. One of the things I can’t stop noticing with this soundtrack on repeat at our house is the way we get to know all twelve main characters not just through what they sing but how they sing it.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Louisa

Louisa is the first of the supporting cast to get a solo. We learn, in her fabulous alto song (thank you, Disney!), that she feels she’s carrying the weight of the family on her shoulders. Probably because, very often, she quite literally is. You can hear this pressure to be performative not only in the words, and not only in how the song is orchestrated, but in the very way she speaks.

When Louisa is explaining all she does to hold the family, she uses a host of poetic devices: internal rhyme, assonance, and alliteration pile on top of one another, and end rhymes are complicated: older/shoulder, surface/worsens/purpose, etc.

‘Surface Pressure’ is also the only song to make allusions. She references Greek mythology with the line about Hercules, as well as referencing the sinking of the Titanic. Clearly, she’s intelligent, and clearly, she’s carrying a lot.

This becomes even clearer with the contrast in the bridge of ‘Surface Pressure.’ The whole song slows down; the music that has been building drops out. The only rhymes we get are wait/shake/weight. After that, we lose the rhythm and rhyme that’s defined her song so far, showing us how much she wants to be able to slow down and not have to carry everything for her family anymore.

In a single song, with the variance in rhythm and rhyme, we learn that what looks effortless to Mirabel’s older sister is actually not only difficult, but ready to destroy her. The content is then mirrored in how she speaks about it.

Isabela

Unlike Louisa, we are led to misunderstand Isabela for most of the movie, along with our protagonist Mirabel. She is perfect, we are told. When we’re first introduced to her in ‘We Don’t Talk about Bruno,’ not only is she the one family member to have something good to say about Bruno, but she uses the fewest, simplest, and most perfect rhyme and rhythm patterns for her verse.

She gets a four-line verse that mirrors the simplest of pop songs. The rhyme scheme is ABCB, meaning the second and fourth lines rhyme, and that’s it, besides a small internal rhyme in the first line.

Camilo technically has fewer words than Isabela, but his are so dramatic, both lyrically and musically, that it looms much larger than Isabela’s perfection.

By the end of that song, we are frustrated with Isabela right along with Mirabel. But the next song in the movie is Isabela’s solo (kind of duet, but we’ll focus on her here), where we learn all of the above — including the rhyme and rhythm she lives by — is a façade she keeps because it’s what their family wants of her.

After all, there is a subtle complexity to what she says Bruno told her. ‘The life of her dreams’ wasn’t marrying Mariano, after all, nor is her power limited to the flowers she’s limited herself to growing to please her family.

Let’s look at ‘What Else Can I Do’ lyrically. The inciting incident for her song is a growing irritation with her sister that makes her accidentally sprout a cactus between herself and Mirabel. The first verse is her reacting to this cactus. In it, the first four lines don’t rhyme at all, and when the fifth line comes and rhymes with the second, it feels accidental. For the first time in her life, Isabela is simply saying what’s on her mind, without planning out the perfect rhyme and rhythm first.

In the next four lines that Isabela sings, she’s explaining the kind of life she’s always tried to live to please her family. In it, we have the rhyme scheme AA BB A BB (although not all the internal rhymes are perfect). She is showing us through her rhyme scheme how she worked to be the perfect daughter like she works to make that verse perfect.

When she grows into herself in a third verse, her word choice, assonance, and alliteration all get more complex, as does the rhyme scheme. Interestingly, her word choice becomes violent — hurricanes, strangling — as she chooses a variety of plants that are beautiful, useful, and, in some cases, deadly.

As she sings about what she really wants to do, her words come quicker and more complex. The opposite of Louisa, Isabela had been holding back and is able to show her own capabilities and what interests her as the bridge approaches. She proves she’s so much more than the person she’d been pigeonholed into being.

Abuela

When we’re introduced to everyone in ‘The Family Madrigal,’ Abuela’s solo is to the tune of ‘Dos Oruguitas,’ the song that plays as she explains her past and trauma to Mirabel later. So in order to understand Abuela, we should compare her verse to the words in ‘Dos Oruguitas.’

In ‘The Family Madrigal,’ Abuela says that their job is to keep the miracle burning with work and dedication. They must earn their gifts, she says, and there is an implication throughout the movie that they earn them by doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Abuela has taken on the cadence, rhythm, and rhyme scheme (AABBB) of the song that has defined her entire life since the miracle found her family, but she didn’t understand the words or the lesson she was supposed to learn. She’s committed to keeping things the same.

But ‘Dos Oruguitas,’ especially in Spanish, is about how necessary it is to unmake and remake oneself, apart from the people who love us, even. The themes are about change, falling apart, and separating from our loved ones so we can grow. This is far from what Abuela says in her introduction. But by the end of the movie, in ‘All of You,’ Abuela is ready to join in the family melody (‘All of You’ and ‘The Family Madrigal’ have more similarities than differences) and tells her family the miracle is simply their existence. She’s learned to not hold on too tight.

I’m guessing there’s a tiny fraction of my audience that is going to use lyrics or poetry to characterize (although if you write musical theatre, hello and welcome and please tell me about your shows!). But that doesn’t mean this isn’t relevant in writing fiction at all. Look at how your characters speak, their cadence, their analogies, how they act when they’re trying their hardest to please people versus when they’re alone and being themselves. Do they try to seem smart? Seem pretty? Are they stuck in old ways of thinking that you can show with dated language or references to the past?

How can you show your reader who your characters are?

How Encanto Uses Lyrical Form as Characterization was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.