Jared Bush, Byron Howard, Yvett Merino and Clark Spencer receive the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film for 'Charm'. BRIAN SNYDER (REUTERS)
Encanto
, Disney's animated film inspired by Colombian history, geography and culture, has won the award for Best Animated Film tonight.
"We want to thank all of Colombia," said Byron Howard, co-director of the film, upon receiving the award with his two co-team members.
“I am proud to be part of a film that brings beautiful and diverse characters to the fore, and that people around the world can see themselves in,” said co-producer Yvette Merino.
Encanto
, a film about a Colombian and multicultural family with extraordinary gifts, called Los Madrigal, has been a great success for Disney mainly because of its soundtrack.
Her song
No Se Habla de Bruno
has been leading the Billboard music chart for several weeks, as has her entire soundtrack, which even had more plays and sales than the last album by the English singer Adele (a success that Disney did not had repeated since the soundtrack of Aladdin, film of 1992).
This year
Encanto
was nominated for Best Animated Film (competing with two from the same production company,
Luca
and
Raya and the last dragon
), Best Soundtrack (which won the film
Dune)
and Best Original Song.
The song nominated by Disney this year was
Dos Oruguitas
, performed at the Oscars by Colombian Sebastián Yatra, who appeared at the awards wearing a black suit decorated with yellow butterflies that evoke the novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
.
He was accompanied by a couple who danced Colombian rhythms such as bambuco, mapalé, cumbia and some salsa, and behind them a decoration that evokes the biodiversity of the Colombian geography.
The song was composed by New York Puerto Rican Lin-Manuel Miranda, who announced before the award ceremony that he would not be able to attend because his wife tested positive for Covid-19.
"My children and I came out negative, but as a precaution I will not go to the Oscars," he explained on his social networks.
Later, the Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi, the Colombian Carolina Gaitán, the North Americans Becky G, Stephanie Beatriz and Megan Thee Stallion sang the great success of the film,
Bruno is not spoken of.
The film has been a box office success too – more than $250 million since it was released five months ago, in November of last year.
Charm
was directed and written by Americans Charise Castro Smith, Jared Bush, Byron Howard, the latter two also directors of
Zootopia
, another Disney success that won the Oscar for best animated film in 2017.
Encanto
is a film inspired by the magical realism of the novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
–in it there are references to the yellow butterflies, the matriarch of the Buendía family or Remedios la Bella– but whose central theme is a family drama.
Mirabel, granddaughter of the Madrigal family, is the only one of her clan who does not have a special gift such as healing wounds with food or camouflaging herself as a chameleon.
Unlike the superhero movies,
Charm
rather it has a space to question the characters 'I can do everything'.
Its protagonists are all women, and reflection little by little calls into question the obligations of being the most beautiful, the strongest, the most perfect.
Bruno, an uncle harshly judged by the matriarch of the family, has also become a central figure for representing the enormous abysses that can be created between relatives.
"It fills us with pride that the film
Encanto
, inspired by the cultural and natural wealth of our country, receives recognition as the best animated film at the Oscars," Colombian President Iván Duque wrote about the news of the award.
"This is, without a doubt, an invitation to the world to discover the magic of Colombia."
"Colombia has a huge stigma, of little worth, like Mirabel [the film's protagonist]," Alejandra Espinosa, a writer and one of several Disney advisers to create the script, told EL PAÍS.
“We don't know who we are, always looking for foreign cultural models to define ourselves.
At the center of the debate I always put identity.”
Encanto
is an animated and very Disney identity for Colombia, but at the same time a different proposal for a country that has normally been associated more with a series like
Narcos
and not with Mirabel, that girl with glasses who wins an Oscar tonight with her
Encanto .
