For a long time now, Disney has been plowing the fields that Joseph Campbell cleared for us. The monomyth has been the (assumed) backbone of pretty much every Disney story. This film is no exception, as powerful in recent times as, for example, Moana.
There is a set of plot elements, culture representation etc. That one must expect from today's american mainstream movies. Although many have the feeling those elements are part of a revolution in representation and culture, those fixed sets of representation guidelines have always been there: Disney doesn't make them up, merely extracts them from pop culture and excel sheets.
So this film is built as the self-revelation story of a young colombian girl, who steps on all the chapters of the circle of Campbells' myth. Further, the supposedly sexier girl IS included in the story as a side character, as is her shallow superficial love interest (voiced by a similarly shallow music star). There's also a remote reference to rivers as borders (this was probably still developed during Trump's time in office). All this is dressed dressed in the usual shapes of musical genre staging, lots of objects (and characters) that can be depicted and reproduced as merchadising.
But this film is something else. All the above is the basics that allow for the film to be greenlighted. The power in the story is in how it is literally built. So truly the main character is the House. Every human character from the Madrigal family is almost literally an extension of the house, its tentacles. Each family member has their own identity and gift given by the magic that created the house and inscribed in the doors of their own private worlds. Inside these rooms one finds new spaces, physically impossible to match to the outside shape of the house. So the power here is in the idea of a magical space, that's animated (in Beetlejuice fashion) and that magic extends to the humans that are partly co-created by the the house (and the candle, set at a window as the heart of the house). One of those characters, Bruno, actually lives in the guts of the house, between skins, circulated inside the walls, Ratatouille style, multiplying the spacial effects: the more we find about the house, spatially, the more intense and deep the drama is. And that drama, the path our heroin has to follow is precisely the finding of her own magic, the right to her life inscribed in a door. So the equivalence between space and life is something already tried before, but ever so powerful, and not so used in mainstream movies.
There is a set of plot elements, culture representation etc. That one must expect from today's american mainstream movies. Although many have the feeling those elements are part of a revolution in representation and culture, those fixed sets of representation guidelines have always been there: Disney doesn't make them up, merely extracts them from pop culture and excel sheets.
So this film is built as the self-revelation story of a young colombian girl, who steps on all the chapters of the circle of Campbells' myth. Further, the supposedly sexier girl IS included in the story as a side character, as is her shallow superficial love interest (voiced by a similarly shallow music star). There's also a remote reference to rivers as borders (this was probably still developed during Trump's time in office). All this is dressed dressed in the usual shapes of musical genre staging, lots of objects (and characters) that can be depicted and reproduced as merchadising.
But this film is something else. All the above is the basics that allow for the film to be greenlighted. The power in the story is in how it is literally built. So truly the main character is the House. Every human character from the Madrigal family is almost literally an extension of the house, its tentacles. Each family member has their own identity and gift given by the magic that created the house and inscribed in the doors of their own private worlds. Inside these rooms one finds new spaces, physically impossible to match to the outside shape of the house. So the power here is in the idea of a magical space, that's animated (in Beetlejuice fashion) and that magic extends to the humans that are partly co-created by the the house (and the candle, set at a window as the heart of the house). One of those characters, Bruno, actually lives in the guts of the house, between skins, circulated inside the walls, Ratatouille style, multiplying the spacial effects: the more we find about the house, spatially, the more intense and deep the drama is. And that drama, the path our heroin has to follow is precisely the finding of her own magic, the right to her life inscribed in a door. So the equivalence between space and life is something already tried before, but ever so powerful, and not so used in mainstream movies.