We Need To Talk About Bruno

The Magical Healing Message of Encanto

Encanto is such an amazing movie about family, relationships, mental health, grief, and relationships.

Did you notice the disorders/struggles of many of the family members?

🌺 Isabela — The perfectionist who can’t be honest about wanting something different than what everyone else thinks she should want.

💪 Luisa — The woman who is depressed and feels the weight of the world on her shoulders. She can’t bear it all alone forever.

🌩 Pepa — Feels anxious and trapped by her emotions. Storms brew around her whenever she’s upset or hurt.

👂🏻Dolores — Carries the burden of everyone’s secrets

😰 Bruno — The obsessive compulsive worrier. He’s got nervous habits like throwing salt over his shoulder or knocking on wood, and worries that he ruins everything and doesn’t have a place in his family.

😭 Grandma — Grief. Grief. Grief. And so much pressure to do everything right, lest another terrible tragedy fall upon her family.

And many of these struggles is in part, referred to as a “gift” in the movie.

This puts pressure on each character to not show the “shadow” side of their gifts…

“We can’t acknowledge weakness. Too many people are depending on us. We are too afraid of what will happen.”

This pressure exists in nearly every family.

I also thought it was interesting that there was no real villain.

The villain was technically the grandma… and she had pure, loving intentions.

And the way the “villain” was vanquished was through integrating the shadow. Acknowledging the truth. Having hard conversations. Tolerating anxiety for growth.

It turns out Mirabel — the girl who thought she didn’t have a gift — had one all along. It was listening to the pains of others, seeing them for who they truly were, and speaking the truth.

In the end, using Mirabel’s gift was the only way they could “rebuild” the family house from the foundation up to recreate the magic.

Successful relationships and happy families are not immune to tragedy. And their greatest downfall is often the unspoken secrets, and our unaddressed fears lurking in the shadows.

When we do the work to have the hard conversations, magic truly happens.

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