Why Representation in Film is Not Enough: Upholding the Model Minority Myth in Disney’s Encanto

Show bill for Disney’s Encanto. Photo courtesy of Disney on Flickr. 

One year ago, Walt Disney Animation Studios released Encanto, a film that many have taken as an allegory for generational trauma, immigration, and even the refugee crisis. The film has been incredibly successful, partly because of its international audience and its contributions to Latine representation. Encanto’s progressive elements include its cultural inclusivity and accuracy, as well as its rejection of gender and Latine stereotypes. However, centering discussions solely on the film’s progressive nature makes it difficult for viewers to address or even begin to acknowledge its limitations—including, most importantly, its inability to properly humanize refugees.

The film follows Mirabel, a Colombian teen, and her magical family, the Madrigals. Mirabel’s grandmother, Abuela, runs the Madrigal residence, which is within the mountains of their Encanto. The Encanto is a charming refuge that appeared to Abuela and the others fleeing her town in a time of crisis. Just moments into the film, viewers are forced to grapple with the unfortunate truth that Mirabel and her family are refugees. In one of the first scenes, it is revealed that Mirabel, unlike the rest of her family, doesn't have a magical ability, unlike all of her grandmother’s descendants. In other movies such as Cinderella, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the main characters are defined by two main qualities: innocence and beauty. Their innocence is almost always highlighted through their ability to communicate with animals. Their beauty is highlighted as it is always the cause of their victimization by others as well as what allows them to be “saved.” Mirabel holds none of these traditional traits, and viewers are faced with a choice: to see Mirabel as the “other,” as her family sees her, or to see her as human and part of a larger group. In making Mirabel both the “other” and the main character, Disney creates a new understanding, allowing its viewers to see that flawed characters are equally capable of being protagonists, and thus worthy of compassion. 

Though making the outsider (or the other) the main character of a film may seem progressive, Disney falls short in other areas within this film. Unlike the multidimensional representation of Mirabel, the group she is a part of is characterized as a one-dimensional unit that lacks nuance or complexity. Through their wholly innocent characterization, Mirabel’s community maintains the status of innocence that Mirabel does not. Mirabel’s neighbors are all refugees residing in the safe haven that is the Encanto. Her community is not depicted as helpless or reliant, as refugees traditionally are. It is quite the opposite: the community is self-sufficient, and viewers are prompted to regard them as independent, righteous, and exceptional. With the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine and the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, the importance of humanizing refugees is apparent. Now more than ever, we see the heavy pressure placed on refugee groups to prove themselves as exceptionally good, law-abiding, and productive citizens in order to garner public support. With Palestine, for example, any sort of resistance to Israeli occupation is seen as a justification for their continued oppression. It is important to depict Palestinians in their full humanity, because it is in that fullness that we can begin to understand their entire struggle, rather than tokenizing the palatable aspects of it. In Ukraine, the obvious and egregious aggression of Russia evokes sympathy from the general public as people lost their lives defending their homeland.

Portraying Encanto’s residents as exceptional may come off as progressive because it challenges notions of what it means to be a refugee. However, Disney’s decision to portray residents of the Encanto as self-sufficient serves a larger purpose: in a film centered on minorities, Disney chose to cater to its white audience and did so by making the refugee population remarkable. As scholars like Saidiya Hartman and Jackie Wang have argued, white sympathy is dependent on the innocence of a subject because, without innocence, white groups are incapable of humanizing other groups. The only way white people can sympathize with victims of racialized violence is if these victims lie within white experiences and comprehension—in other words, if, and only if, victims reside in the zone of being, or the white imaginary.  In order to garner sympathy from a white audience, the groups depicted in Encanto must be completely innocent. Because any reliance on outsiders would signify weakness and parasitism, Disney makes the community of migrants, refugees, and Madrigals completely self-sufficient, inflating their innocence and, consequently, allowing these refugees to enter the white imaginary.

According to essayist and professor Elaine Scarry, our inability to imagine the “other” is a human flaw—an innate limitation that minimizes the humanity of others. It is almost impossible for us to imagine more than one fictional character in books, never mind real humans or entire populations. Our inability to imagine others, along with the limitations of the white imaginary, prompted Disney to regress back into its traditional, one-dimensional way of portraying others. 

The community’s inflated innocence is what makes it so difficult for viewers to see how Disney’s Encanto is not as progressive as it may seem. Portraying a group of people who have been historically vilified as innocent is not necessarily problematic. Rather, it is the film’s hyperfixation on the community’s innocence that limits their humanity. In presenting the Encanto’s residents as one-dimensional, Disney dehumanizes refugees, undoing any achievements in Latine representation that it strove to achieve.

In Encanto, Disney challenges viewers by asking them to empathize with a main character who, even by the end of the film, is not known for her talents or beauty. Disney effectively frames the protagonist in a way that doesn’t detract from her humanity by making Mirabel ordinary and flawed. However, Disney does the opposite by portraying the rest of Mirabel’s community as perfectly unified and self-sufficient. This deviation from the stereotype that migrants and refugees are parasitic to other communities should not be seen as progressive, but rather as a way for Disney to appeal to a white, albeit progressive, audience. 
Acknowledging Disney’s triumphs in Encanto is just as important as acknowledging its shortcomings. Having a historically and culturally accurate piece of media is a great first step in representing the “other.” However, Disney should aim to humanize the entire group, not just an “othered” individual, as they do with Mirabel. Media, whether it be children’s movies or world news coverage, needs to change. The representation Disney uses to evoke pride and the methods that journalists use to victimize their subjects to evoke pity are both sides of the same coin: both dehumanize marginalized groups by reducing them to a single-faceted identity that can enter the white imaginary. We need to move away from the complete victimization and vilification of groups, and realize that efforts of representation are futile without humanization.

Alannis Jáquez (CC ‘25) is a native New Yorker majoring in Political Science. She is primarily interested in issues plaguing urban communities such as health, environmental, and housing injustice.