Mirabel

I really didn't want to support this film simply because its another disney+ exclusive and I utterly loathe disney. but that's why piracy is great, kids!

I really only had one major disappointment which was the pacing, it felt wayyy too fast. I think there needed to be more any downtime of just Mirabel and the family interacting with each other and implying their feelings and stuff like that. five more minutes in the second act would have been more than enough.

I think a way it could have gone down to give more of the family more opportunity to express themselves might look like this:
Mirabel sneaks into Bruno's room, finds the pieces of the vision, all of that is unchanged except maybe faster because it's not an action-adventure so teasing it and going nowhere with it is objectively a waste of time. She comes back down, tries to talk about it, is shut down by Abuela, tries to talk to Tía Pepa, We Don't Talk About Bruno happens. She can still have rushed off during the song to put the vision together, but cutting the part where her father and therefore Dolores find out. Mirabel is being extremely awkward at the table because she wants this stupid dinner over with so she can try to talk to Dolores, and she's acting weirder and weirder until Abuela asks what on earth is wrong with her (mirroring Family Madrigal), and Mirabel spits it out and all hell breaks loose.
She finds Camilo first, asks him what he remembers about Bruno because it seems he can only take the form of people he knows. He's probably sarcastic as all get out about it, acting like he doesn't care, very quippy. As Mirabel turns away to find Dolores on the other side of the veranda, the camera lingers on Camilo who has a really regretful look, sad that he never got to know him outside of village rumors. Dolores tries to get up the stairs to hide in her room but la Casita doesn't let her, forcing them to talk. She squeaks about this. Dolores confesses that she's known the entire time that Bruno never really left but was too afraid to talk about it, maybe we get to see a flashback of young Dolores trying to tell Félix that she hears him around the house and is pretty sure she saw him once, but her mother is immediately triggered by this and starts shouting about how she never wants to hear about him again, maybe we even see a brief moment of Camilo being woken up by the ruckus and he looks like he's so tired of hearing her yelling about it. Dolores has her hands clamped so hard over her ears and she's starting to cry.
snap back to reality, Mirabel spots one of Tío Bruno's rats scurrying off with a piece of the vision, and chases after it, and the rest of the movie continues.

I want to show at least Pepa being borderline abusive because that's how generational trauma works and Pepa is the most emotionally unstable, which can be used to great effect here. Abuela is traumatized, she traumatizes her children, they traumatize theirs and the cycle continues indefinitely until at least one parent breaks the cycle on their children. If Abuela were the only abusive one, it would be just a toxic family, but the movie goes out of its way to imply that it's much deeper than that, so I want it to go all the way. We can have all the headcanons in the world but that doesn't retroactively write the movie y'know?

tbh when my problems with the movie are that I want to spend more time with the family, I think its doing something right. and i must say that the argument between Abuela and Mirabel hit so so so so close to home, my daddy issues might be worse than Bruno's mommy issues lol </3
as an aside because i gotta throw it out there, the music is very good. my favorite was Family Madrigal and my least favorite was Surface Pressure because the lyrics are really really lame and too on the nose for me.