Lin-Manuel Miranda’s encanto-era songbook is now being measured against Pixar’s Coco, and the comparison lands on a simple conclusion: Coco did the same thing first, and did it better. Walt Disney Animation Studios released Encanto in 2021, but the overlap with Pixar’s 2017 film goes beyond surface similarity.
Coco And Encanto
Both films are steeped in Latin American culture and built around extended family, which is why the comparison keeps resurfacing. Coco arrived in 2017 with a focus on Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday, while Encanto centered a Colombian family inside a magical house and gave its story a coming-of-age ceremony where every Madrigal receives a special power except Mirabel.
That shared framework makes the newer film look less original than its reputation suggests. Encanto also gets by without a true Disney villain, with conflict split between Abuela and Bruno instead, a structure that keeps the story inside the family rather than sending it toward an outside threat.
Mirabel Without A Gift
Mirabel is the pressure point in Encanto because she is the family outcast left without the gift that defines everyone else in the Madrigal line. The film’s emotional engine depends on that absence, but Coco had already used music, family memory, and cultural specificity to build a similarly focused story around identity and inheritance.
Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the songs for Encanto, and many of them reached charts around the world. That gave the movie a commercial identity as a musical, but it also made the similarities harder to ignore: both films lean on songs to carry family conflict, and both turn cultural tradition into the main narrative hook rather than background color.
Disney’s 2021 Overlap
2021 is the year Encanto entered Disney’s lineup, and the confusion over whether it was a Pixar movie only sharpened the comparison. The studio has also kept moving forward with other titles, including Zootopia 2, which hit theaters late last year, Toy Story 5, and Hexed, due out November 25.
For viewers deciding whether Encanto still feels distinct, the answer is narrower than the marketing suggested. Coco did the Latin American family-musical model first, and the better case now is that Encanto succeeds when Miranda’s songs and Mirabel’s family crisis are treated as a refinement of that template, not a reinvention of it.
