Disney's 'Encanto' Creators Break Down the Gift Ceremony Scene

So that little moment where, you know,

you can see she's nervous and

she's kind of wiping her hands off on her dress.

The internet thought, maybe, that she wiped,

she touched the candle and wiped the magic off.

It's not what happens.

Hi, I'm Jared Bush.

Co-writer and director of Encanto.

Hi, I'm Yvett Merino.

I am one of the producers of Encanto.

And I'm Charise Castro Smiths,

co-writer and co-director of Encanto.

And this is 'Notes on a Scene.'

[peaceful choir music]

[sentimental music]

[Jared] This is Antonio's gift ceremony

and Mirabel is walking him to his door,

which is a very difficult moment for Antonio

and even more difficult for Mirabel,

because she is experiencing her gift ceremony

all over again.

[crowd cheers]

[tiles flip]

So from really early on,

we knew we wanted to have truth in materials.

Like if it's a tile, it cannot turn into jelly

and bend and things, right?

So it had to like actually move the way

those materials would move.

One of the amazing animators came up with this idea

of them flipping over to kind of express emotion.

It ended up being just one of the most amazing ways

that the house could express itself in the movie.

The other thing that I love in this moment,

if you listen, is the sound design of the tiles.

You know, that's something that our sound designer,

Shannon, spent a lot of time actually kind of musicalising

the way the tiles come out.

So it's not just one sound.

You get a little personality

and you also get a little bit of warmth from the house.

So it feels like this living thing,

that's almost a musical instrument.

[tiles flip]

[crowd cheers]

It's like every chance we got, we tried to add

little things that the house does.

The fact that it puts these spotlights on Antonio

but it doesn't do it super expertly.

You know, it's a little off, you know,

the lights don't go at the same time.

It's not perfect.

And we, we love those little imperfections in the house.

They give it a little extra personality.

[tiles flip]

[sentimental music]

[whispers] I can't.

[whispers] I need you.

Okay.

All right.

The 'I need you' every time, every time...

Yeah.

Very, very early on.

It's like, as you were saying, it's her best friend.

He looks up to her so much.

And for him to just say, I need you.

Yeah, it's so sweet.

How do you say no to that?

Mirabel has glass in her glasses.

And so we had to look at the reflections

in every single frame of every moment

to make sure that you're still able to read her eyes

through that.

And we were constantly adjusting how much reflection,

literally frame to frame, to make sure that the emotion

was never muted.

But at the same time,

you never thought that the glasses weren't there.

So that was something that we spent a lot of time

to figure out.

Obviously right now she's in the shadows.

It's lit by these lamps, from the house

and from candle light, from the magic candle itself.

So, light played a huge part in this whole sequence,

as she's sort of stepping outta the shadows

into the warmth of the courtyard.

[footsteps on tile]

[sentimental music]

We talked a lot about Columbian culture,

but in Latinx culture, how really it's touch,

it's the touching and the closeness,

and there's not a huge sense of space,

and so really, even in the way,

like Julieta is holding Camilo...

These two are holding hands together

and it's all very natural and common.

And so it's all these tiny little things

that the animators put in, but just, I love.

I mean, that's something that

both the animation department

and our technical animation has to go in

and make sure that those interactions feel right.

You can even see, like, there's hands on shoulders.

These are little subtle moments that go a long way

to really making it feel like

you are steeped in that culture.

[sentimental music]

[Mirabel] Come on.

Let's get you to your door.

[Mirabel exhales]

So that is one of my favorite lines.

When she says, 'Come on, let's get you to your door,'

because of the way that she says it to him.

Even though she's clearly dying on the inside,

this is impossible for her.

She's not trying to show any of that weight to him.

She's effortless and 'you can do this.'

And I always loved it 'cause it shows

such a strength of character for her to make this choice.

In that moment,

you can see the way that he's looking at her now,

how much that means and giving him that confidence.

It really shows what a strong character Mirabel is.

Even at her own expense.

Look at that face, just look at that face.

I love him so.

I'd say, pay special attention to the way

that she breathes through the next moment.

He can't see her face anymore,

and she's looking forward

and that this is gonna be hard and I need to go through it.

It's something that we actually spent a lot of time

and redid the animation several times

to get that expression just right,

so that she wasn't pitying herself.

It was, it just,

she knows that what's about to happen is gonna hurt.

[sentimental music]

Oh, and then also her costume, we were really thinking,

that this moment of becoming in the family Madrigal

is, like, a little bit like a first communion.

It's a rite of passage.

Antonio has his cute white little suit

and Mirabel has her little first communion looking dress.

It's like this ritual that they all have to go through.

The embroidery on her dress, which is little butterflies,

'cause she doesn't have her gift yet.

Everybody's costume, once they get their gift,

has something to do with their gift.

But this, she's like in this moment before it's happened,

she's got butterflies,

'cause they don't know what her gift is gonna be yet.

[sentimental music]

We did something in this film that we don't do a lot

at Disney Animation, which was we played with

depth of field quite a bit.

So if you'll pay attention to the way

Mirabel looks, you know, this is a flashback.

So there's a little haziness,

but behind her we really blurred out the background,

the crowd there are well out of focus.

So we're really paying attention to her.

You get the sense of the weight of expectations,

but without seeing individual people

or individual expressions that would take

your attention away from her.

Little Mirabel is nervous,

but expecting things to go well.

Older Mirabel is remembering this moment

and how hard that was and thinking back to...

She's really reliving each step of that.

So with each step up the stair,

she's even closer to that moment

that went so poorly for her.

So I think what's really nice is there's

this building tension over the course of the scene,

which also helps the tension of,

will Antonio get his gift or not?

So you're kind of doing two things at the same time.

[sentimental music]

Thinking about how the magic of the door would look,

took a lot of different iterations.

Like you can see here, there's this swirly magic.

And we wanted that magic to be reminiscent

of the candle itself.

So even matching the colors

and there's those little pops of light

that are boca lighting,

but we all call them focal lighting,

'cause they're not real sort of lens flares or anything,

but we also match those between the candle

and the door,

so that you really got this connection of the magic

between those two things.

This is one of my favorite shots of Abuela,

because with no words, no dialogue,

the animators are so amazing at getting

all of the emotion, and as you said,

it really is their closest moment and there's so much love,

but we've already been through the whole,

'maybe you should just step aside' moment.

Maybe you should, you know,

leave it to everyone else.

And so, it kills me every time I see it.

She was her favorite, right?

Yeah.

Like before it all went downhill.

[sentimental music]

So that little moment where you could see she's nervous

and she kind of wiping her hands off on her dress,

the internet thought, maybe that she wiped,

she touched the candle and wiped the magic off.

It's not what happens.

It's really just sort of like a little character moment.

I don't even know if that was written in the script.

I think that might have been from one of the animators,

in this moment thinking like, what would you do

if you were that age and

okay, your hands might be a little sweaty,

but also you wanna sort of like look good

as you're heading up there.

So I thought it was such a wonderful,

very specific character beat.

[sentimental music]

This door knob is very key,

because it's an M for Mirabel, right?

Because it's supposed to be her special door.

But then at the end of the movie, spoiler alert,

it's M again for the Madrigals, for the whole family.

Here's something I absolutely love,

that lighting pulled off so well.

We don't see the beginnings of this door

starting to disappear.

We see this expectation and she can't wait.

And then little bit by little bit, you see the light start

to fade away on the top of her head.

The music is telling us the things are not going the way

they should, but also her expression is,

and the lighting is, but we hold off the actual reveal

of what that looked like just to be with her in that moment.

That was really emotionally effective.

[sentimental music]

Abuela in this moment, like watching the candle flicker,

which Mirabel doesn't see, like it's kind of

the beginning of everything.

It's the beginning of the downfall.

It's the beginning of everything that Mirabel has to fix

in the movie,

but not for the reasons that Abuela thinks.

No dialogue, but you see the confusion on her face.

Yeah.

The 'trying to process what's happening.'

The 'what does it mean?'

There's so much, I know there's so much going on

in her mind right there.

One of the things that we really liked here

is that notion

that the candle doesn't flicker until after this moment.

And one of the reasons we like that,

is we always thought that there was a connection

between Abuela's unconditional love and the magic.

And that when that door started to fade,

that there might have been something

in her unconditional love that wavered.

And as a result, the candle also wavered.

So figuring out that timing and understanding those rules,

even if we never convey them to the audience

was something that we had to know as we were creating

the story.

[sentimental music]

Will you use your gift to honor our miracle?

Will you serve this community and strengthen our home?

This is another thing that was really tricky

to figure out,

is this transition from the flashbacks into this moment,

back to real time.

And we got a lot of help here, both visually,

in terms of the lighting going back and forth,

but also if you listen to the sound,

the sound design and the effect that you hear

on Abuela's voice,

isn't coming straight in.

It's kind of echoey and a little dreamy.

And there's a little bit of a segue

that happens to get you back into this moment.

[sentimental music]

Will you use your gift to honor our miracle?

Will you serve this community and strengthen our home?

[sentimental music]

This is like one of my favorite shots

in the entire movie,

where we like transitioned between Abuela's

just like terrified face, just to Mirabel right behind her,

who's also nervous and feeling so much,

just for totally different reasons

and how close they are in this movie,

but how far away they are.

[sentimental music]

[dramatic music]

So Germaine Franco composed our score

and the theme that you're hearing right now,

is the theme that she wrote for the Miracle for the Encanto.

And you can hear, like this,

'is it gonna happen? Is it not gonna happen?'

And right when he puts his hand on that doorknob,

the theme starts to really ramp up and swell over that part.

That theme keeps on coming through our story.

Anytime there's this moment of miracle,

because it really underscores, I think,

how important and wondrous it is for the family,

for the right reasons.

[dramatic music]

I love this part,

because you don't exactly know what his gift is gonna be yet

but you do know that it has worked out.

We talked actually a lot about that toucan

and how we were gonna establish what Antonio's gift was,

how it was used,

because the fact is he communicates

with words to animals at like sort of telepathically.

[bird caws]

Uh huh, uh huh.

I understand you.

[bird caws]

Those aren't toucan noises.

That's actually Alan Tudyk, that's been heavily processed.

He did his homework and when he first came in, he told us,

that our bird sounds we had in there were not toucans.

There were like some parrot.

He's like, that's not a toucan

this is what a toucan sounds like.

And he spent hours doing different toucan impressions

and we'd say dialogue to him in English.

And he'd respond in toucan.

And it was one of my favorite things.

If you really listen to it,

you can actually kind of hear him making all those noises,

as they were going through this scene, which I love.

Of course they can come. [laughs]

[toucan calls]

[upbeat music]

[animals chatter]

[Abuela exhales]

We have a new gift!

[crowd cheers]

Let's talk about our little coffee kid here.

Yeah.

The first thing that he does, our little coffee kid here,

the first thing that he does is [cheers].

And drink some coffee.

But really you look at Dolores who is so happy,

but has to cover ears for the noise.

And Camilo...

Oh, I mean, Camilo's excited, right?

That's his brother and he's got this gift.

He's so excited for him.

Like Luisa's got these really big athletic claps

going back there.

I think Isabela has a little princess clap.

So these are all very specific decisions on behalf of

our animators going in there

and doing all of those individually.

Again, that takes an enormous amount of time

but gives you this amazing specificity,

so that you understand each character

is coming from a different place

and has a different personality.

[crowd cheers]

[choir music]

Listening to the score

and as we transition into this

beautiful Afro- Colombian choir, that Germaine sought out.

The choir was in Colombia, Germaine was here,

and recording this amazing music to the score

and it just adds so much.

And it just literally takes me

and puts me into, yeah, this space.

[Charise] This is a great frame to talk about

the transition between the, sort of, more roomy aspects

and like the jungley aspects,

which was really based on an idea from one of our artists,

named Camille Andre,

who did this awesome painting of these tiles

that were sort of like turning into moss.

And it inspired this whole idea

of the room transitioning into wild.

Basically I think the directive was like,

make the bedroom that literally every little kid

would dream of having.

And it's that like, it's just the natural environment

just blending into this room,

these little toad stools all over the tree.

And like the, I love the lights that are sort of

throughout all the trees and this little rope bridge.

And yeah, I just, I think, the natural world blending

with the kind of casita of it all is so cool in this scene.

Just a little shout-out to our environments team here.

Oh yes.

Who designed it and built it and worked with

our botanist, our Columbian Cultural Trust,

to make sure all of the plants and the animals

and everything was exactly as it should be.

This particular set is based on

a very particular rain forest,

called the Choco rainforest in Columbia.

Each one of these little lights that you see

are these little glass globes, right?

Everywhere you look.

So these had to be placed by hand,,

every single one of these things.

And they go up through here, they're up in here,

they're up in here, they're back in here.

It is an immense amount of attention to detail.

But I think that when you see this whole scene,

like your brain, can't see all those things individually,

but you just get this amazing feel.

What we really were hoping for is that

it would feel like the most special room ever created

for this five year old kid.

That is absolutely wonderful for him.

But then again, at the same time you realize,

oh, these are all the things that Mirabel didn't get,

this wonderful moment, this wonderful celebration

this brand new space.

That's so fantastical, she missed out on.

And that's really, really hard.

It's such a huge emotional part of the film.

This is such an important scene,

because we are all there with her

and with little Antonio, as they're walking down the aisle,

wondering, is that magic going to work?

Is it going to be there?