Disney’s new animated feature, Encanto, also happens to be its 60th animated film, and it doesn’t disappoint. Telling the story of a magical family living in a small village in Colombia, Encanto is a perfect holiday film about tradition, family, and how the two can come apart. The story of this large and gifted family may seem small compared to more epic journeys shown in recent Disney films like Frozen II and Raya and the Last Dragon, but Encanto has more than enough heart to make up for its smaller scale.

RELATED: Lin-Manuel Miranda on Writing the Songs in ‘Encanto’ and Working With One of His Musical Heroes on ‘The Little Mermaid’

The protagonist of Encanto is Mirabel (Stephanie Beatriz), the youngest member of the Madrigal family, a family whose children have been blessed by a miracle that created a living house and gave the children magical powers. All the children, that is, except Mirabel, the first of her family to not receive a gift after coming of age. After her youngest cousin, Antonio, receives his gift, Mirabel learns that the miracle that’s allowed her family and their town to prosper is fading, and it might be her fault. In traditional Disney fashion, Encanto does come to a happy ending. Here’s everything you need to know about Encanto’s ending.

Throughout the story, Mirabel struggles to learn why the miracle protecting her family is failing while trying to live up to the lofty expectations of the family and really, the entire town’s matriarch, her Abuella Alma (María Cecilia Botero, singing voice by Olga Merediz). The weakening miracle has a physical manifestation in the family home, which begins to crack and fall apart around them. Despite Mirabel’s best efforts, she’s not able to stop the house from getting reduced to so much rubble and dust, though her family manages to escape unscathed.

Encanto-Movie
Image Via Disney

To understand the ending, we must begin by understanding the role of the Madrigal family in the town they live in. Alma’s miracle founded the town as its people fled from an unspecified but violent attack on their own village (probably part of La Violencia civil war). Her family has since worked tirelessly in service of the village, using their magical gifts to earn their blessing and keep everybody happy. On the surface, the Madrigals are the perfect family, always happy and helpful. But the magic is a facade they keep up. The members of the family act as Alma needs, always happy, while allowing pressure to build up underneath the magical masks they wear.

For example, Maribel’s older sister, Luisa (Jessica Darrow), has a song that reveals the pressure underneath. Luisa’s gift is simple: She’s incredibly, impossibly strong. Luisa provides all the muscle the village could ever need, even capable of transporting a church with her bare hands. But this strength masks deep anxiety and the impossible stress Luisa is under. She must always be working and strive to be perfect, even as the lack of rest and stress pushes Luisa’s mental health to its limit. The gifts the family has are to be put to use for the village’s benefit without rest.

The house also plays a role in the allegories of the story. It comes crumbling down when Mirabel gets into an argument with Alma that splinters the family and brings their home down around them. These two events are directly interlinked because the house represents the family’s condition. There are several shots where we see the cracks growing as the family argues, tying the two circumstances together. As the family fractures, so does their home. The eventual destruction at the end comes because of Mirabel’s argument with Alma.

Encanto-movie-house
Image Via Disney

The basis of her argument is that Alma is the reason that the family is coming apart. Mirabel blames her excessively high expectations as the reason for Luisa’s stress and her other sister, Isabela’s (Diane Guerrero), pent-up emotions. She blames Alma for all of the family’s problems - and she’s right. This is what destroys the house: Maribel rips the facades and masks aside, forcing Alma and everybody else to look at the broken mess of a family beneath.

Mirabel’s ability to pierce these masks comes from never having developed one of her own. The rest of her family is afraid of disappointing Alma because she’s their grandmother, and she’s the one who helped build the peaceful life around them. Isabela demonstrates this especially. She and Mirabel have always had a rocky relationship on account of Mirabel simply not living up to the ideal of perfection that Isabela radiates with every step and each flower she makes blossom with her gift. But as we learn, Isabela is crushing her desires for freedom and fun beneath that magical perfection. Her song with Mirabel is the first time we see her act as anything but a haughty princess, the first time we see her and Mirabel have fun and bond as sisters in a wild display of messy and fun magic.

But when Alma comes in, Isabela quiets down, refusing to be the free spirit she so desperately craved, becoming meek and quiet, exactly who Alma needed her to be. The family doesn’t want to disappoint her, but Mirabel doesn’t have that same inhibition. Without a gift, Mirabel was frequently sidelined, considered less useful than her sisters and cousins, and, as such, has always been a bit of a disappointment to Alma. This is what lets Mirabel strip aside the barriers the magic has built around the family to expose the ugly truth.

Encanto-disney-grandmother
Image Via Disney

Of course, the movie doesn’t end in a pile of rubble. Mirabel runs away and it’s Alma who finds her at the side of a rushing river, the same spot Alma received the miracle all those years before. Much as Mirabel has peeled away the barriers from her sisters to understand who they were at the core, her argument and the destruction of the family home has pulled away Alma’s barriers, and she confesses that in her fear of losing the miracle, she lost sight of who it was for: Her family, so they could live and thrive.

When Alma and Mirabel return home, they find the villagers coming to help rebuild the family home, returning the favors that have built up over the past several years. Much like the house getting built around them, the Madrigals rebuild themselves into a family that can be whole and stable. The family gets a new foundation that will allow them to be who they want to be, gifts and all, rather than who they’re forced to be. They’re stronger than they were at the beginning, all thanks to Mirabel’s ability to be vulnerable with her relatives. In the end, the blessing comes back when they finish building the house because the family has come back together as a whole. They get their gifts from being united, and the house comes back to life to welcome them home. The message of the family being the blessing may feel trite at first, but Encanto has plenty of soul to make it feel special.