Encanto, My Family and Me — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

When my seven year old son Declan gets into a movie he really gets into a movie. It’s not enough to merely watch it once; he has to watch it over and over again, re-watch videos from it compulsively, sing snippets from its soundtrack in the loudest possible voice he can muster, which is pretty goddamn loud and furiously create drawings of the movie he’s obsessed with.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where this obsessive interest and bottomless fascination with pop culture could have come from. His mother, perhaps?

Like the rest of the world, Declan has been obsessed with Encanto as of late. It has replaced The Nightmare Before Christmas as his all-time favorite movie and his favorite soundtrack. As with The Nightmare Before Christmas, there are tiny little snippets of music that he sings over and over and over again, specifically the lyrics from “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”about Bruno possessing a “seven foot frame, rats along his back.”

Declan loves to draw more than anything in the world, and is freakishly good at it, and Encanto has become his muse over the course of the last month or so.

Encanto is a very important movie in our home but until recently I had not seen it myself for two reasons. I am, as readers of this blog are all too aware, terrified of emotion, particularly sadness. I’m a big softie. It does not take much to make me cry so I knew damn well that Encanto would tug relentlessly at my heartstrings.

I wanted to make sure that I was emotionally prepared for Encanto but I’m so scared of experiencing sadness that I’ll do anything to avoid putting myself in a position where I will be moved to be tears.

The other reason I wanted to wait to see Encanto is because I thought I might have to watch it for work and I didn’t want to ruin it for myself by watching bits and pieces before I was able to take in the whole film.

A few days ago, however, I gave in. Declan and my wife were re-watching Encanto and even though it was about a half hour in my wife invited me to join them so I did.

Even though I only had about a 90 percent sense of what was going on, based on context clues and song lyrics, I was nevertheless just as blown away as the rest of my family. It was beautiful and funny and sad, a rich, vibrant universe realized down to the smallest detail.

By the third act of Encanto, my wife, my son and myself were all weeping uncontrollably, overcome with emotion individually and as a group. Encanto becomes almost unbearably sad at one point. It’s almost too much to take so Declan insists that we fast-forward through that particular section. If you have seen Encanto, you probably know which scene and which song I am referring to.

I have perhaps never felt more like my son, or closer to my son, than I did sitting on the couch, crying in silence as we were overwhelmed by the raw emotion and visceral heartbreak of Encanto at its most devastatingly powerful.

I put off watching Encanto because I knew it would be overwhelming and heartbreaking and inspiring. It was. It felt good to cry, as it counter-intuitively often does, and it felt good to cry alongside my family.

That seems fitting, since Encanto is very much about family as well as mental illness, death and the universal search for meaning and purpose.

Encanto more than lived up to my sky-high expectation. Christ, I’m tearing up just thinking about it.

So if you are the one person in the world who has not experienced Encanto, I heartily recommend it.

It’s pretty good! My family liked it!

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