One Hundred Years of Encanto

or, has anyone read a book?

If you have children, you’ve probably watched Encanto at least a handful of times and listened to We Don’t Talk about Bruno dozens of times, if not hundreds. You probably found the movie and the music inescapable for months.

If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you probably also saw essay after essay doing whatever essayists get paid to write about. Critiques and comparisons and celebrations and so on filled your screen while your children asked you to play Bruno one more time, to let them sing with Luisa one more time.

With so much chatter, I sort of kept waiting for someone to draw the very obvious comparison here. But, even still, months later, I haven’t heard a single person say it, nor have I seen a single person write about it.

Quite frankly, I’m astounded by the deafening silence, so I’ll say it now, finally, here:

Encanto is Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude for babies.

I was struck by this the first time I watched it. I continue to be floored by the similarities. And then, somehow, no one else making this connection drove me slightly insane. So insane, in fact, that I had to reread One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I had not read since I was nineteen.

It’s pretty good!

If you’ve never read it, I definitely recommend it! My memory is a sieve so I remembered almost nothing about this novel except for two moments (one of them, as it turns out, doesn’t even happen, and it continues to blow my mind that the most iconic moment of this novel is something that I invented and believed in so hard that I’ve even described this moment to other people as one of my favorite moments in literature¹), so I was returning to this novel basically blind. And, really, it felt like reading it again for the first time.

The novel is odd in a number of ways. In some ways, it’s archaic. There’s almost a Victorian structure to it², which does much to add to the wild magic of the novel. When reality bends and twists, it feels all the more inventive because the novel feels, in certain ways, as if it’s already a century old, even when it was new.

But the novel is structurally just bizarre. Any single chapter could be broken out and rewritten as, like, three distinct and non-intersecting novels. To call this novel Borgesian is, in some ways, a massive understatement while also completely missing the point.

But let’s take a step back and explain a bit about the novel.

One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place in Colombia in a village called Macondo, which was founded deep in the jungle by Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife after he fled the consequences of killing a man who insulted him. He establishes the village as a utopia and fills it with big dreams.

The novel is just full of stuff happening. But where most writers would take one or two of these events to develop into a novel, Garcia Marquez just throws everything inside. It makes the novel feel somewhat episodic and elliptical, even as it constantly marches forward at a somewhat dizzying pace. By the end of the novel, we’ve lived with seven generations of Buendias, gotten to know all of them despite the brief pages they occupy. We have seen the rise and fall of a civilization, the turbulent tide of an endless war, and many realitybusting moments that keep those pages turning.

Inside of all of this is the Buendia family. A messy, sprawling family tree, full of echoes and singularities. The Buendias, unlike everyone else in the novel, are larger than life to the point of bending reality. They develop uncanny abilities that are sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful, but always their ramifications ripple through Macondo and the many other people who populate the village.

And what is Encanto but a story of a family populated by people with uncanny powers that shape the town they founded after fleeing political turmoil?

Generational trauma, generational consequences, the politics of war in 20th Century Columbia, the magic found far from civilization that bubbles within the bloodlines of a single family who founded a new village—Encanto and One Hundred Years of Solitude are mirrors, of a sort, to one another.

Encanto, being for children and produced by a massive international media juggernaut, treats politics purely as something that happened once upon a time. The magical abilities of the Madrigals are more clearly positive (Bruno is a slight wrinkle that plays into one of the themes of the movie) and recognizable. They’re more like superhero powers, really. The themes relating to destiny are clearer and kinder, allowing for more personal agency.

One Hundred Years of Solitude travels these same paths but everything’s overgrown by unfamiliar plants, cackling with the voices of frightening beasts; the air’s thicker, humid from the jungle’s atmosphere, and the themes are slipperier and more threatening, dangerous enough to wrap round your throat, choke you, bury you beneath roots thick as your leg. We are shaped by our pasts to the point that they may be inescapable, bleeding from generation to generation, while time both marches on and twists back in constant cycles.

Both stories share much of the same DNA. It’s presentation and sensation that make the real differences.

Encanto is the utopia Jose Arcadio Buendia dreamt of. It’s bright and cheerful, full of magic and wonders, free from political strife or even the consequences of the Colombian civil war³ that persists to this day. Encanto is legible, easily digested. It’s fun and inviting, somewhere you want to return to again and again.

It’s the theme park version of this story.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the freakshow version. It’s dirty and alarming and terrifying and perplexing. Macondo is weird and wild, dark and dangerous, surrounded and filled by violence and sex and magic. You find yourself asking, Who is this for? Why is it this way?

Somehow, the transcendence is achieved in both the theme park and the freakshow. The texture of that transcendence is considerably different and, in some ways, leading you in opposite directions, but both might make you cry for the exact same reason, might make you understand yourself better.

You may gasp at the same beauty, presented so divergently. You will grasp after that sensation, the taste of that emotion rising in your chest that you’ve found in so few works of fiction.

Strangely, the best cure for one is the other.

Watching Encanto will make you miss Macondo. Reliving the history of the Buendia family will make you long for the simple beauty and fun of the Madrigals.

We Don’t Talk about Bruno will make you forever haunted by one of the many Arcadio Buendias, and Luisa’s anxiety will send you sprawling back before the immense body of one of the many Jose Buendias.

And for all the quiet bravery and strength of Abuela Madrigal, you will be stunned to silence by the force of nature that is Ursula Iguaran Buendia.

1. Those of you who heard me talk about this were either too kind to correct me or have memories as bad as me or simply never bothered to read this book

2. I’ll explain this in my review of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Spoiler: it sucks!

3. Some may disagree with the use of this term, which is fair. I won’t pretend to be an expert on Colombia. Some of you reading this now likely know far more than I ever will about the last 60 years of Colombian history.