I watched ENCANTO over the weekend. There's some really great story techniques to talk about.
Right at the start, our protagonist Mirabel has her coming of age ceremony, which in her family is the time she's supposed to get a magic power to help them help their community of refugees who have found a haven in the mountains of Central America.
But it turns out she got diddly and squat. And now it's years later and the next member of her family, her little cousin Antonio, is having his ceremony. And she's this very upbeat, generous character who is absolutely fighting every instinct in her toward self-pity or self-recrimination--which is super winning. Having your character behave in a way contrary to what they think or feel is so often a compelling choice.
And we've got this slow build to Antonio's big moment, over the course of which we get to see lots of people in the family nervous and worried, including little Antonio himself. And Mirabel is very much in the mix of it all, wearing that brave face of hers so well.
But then when Antonio goes to his magic door and opens it, in fact it glows just like it's supposed to and it turns out he's been given the power to be friends with animals. And we get this super fun extended sequence where the whole community comes into his room, which is like a whole kingdom on the inside, and he's riding a tiger and there are toucans and a million other animals, and it's all super cool.
Not once in that sequence do we cut back to Mirabel, to see how she's "dealing with this." And it turns out we don't need to. The film has done such a great job of making us feel for her--again, by having her be so upbeat and brave--that we carry her with us into that moment. Everything we see Antonio able to do is tinged with the sadness we feel for Mirabel.
There's a lot of things you can pull from this, but I think the main one is that as writers we are Inceptors, planting ideas in the audience's head. If we do that task well early on, they will take those ideas and run with them (aka do our work for us).
