Disney Animation’s first Latina director Charise Castro Smith talks ‘Encanto,’ power of family

When Disney’s “Encanto” premieres on Nov. 24 it will mark a milestone moment as the company’s 60th animated feature film.

But it also marks another, even more significant cultural moment since it’s the first Walt Disney Animation Studios film co-directed by a Latina and only the second Disney animated feature film directed by a woman.

But while 38-year-old Charise Castro Smith is happy to break the glass ceiling for Latina directors, she doesn’t want to be part of any exclusive club.

“I don’t want to be the only one, I don’t want to be alone in this club. It’s great; I’m glad the milestone has been reached but let’s break down this barrier as soon as humanly possible because there’s no reason for me to be the first and the only,” said Castro Smith, an L.A. resident and experienced TV writer, playwright and actor who makes her directorial debut with the upcoming Disney’s film.

Castro Smith co-directed “Encanto,” which features songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, with Jared Bush and  “Zootopia” co-director Byron Howard.

Castro Smith and Bush co-wrote the film, which is set in Colombia and tells the story of Mirabel Madrigal, a teenage girl who is the only member of her family who doesn’t have magical powers.

“I’m so proud of this movie. It delves into all the joys and complexities of families and everyone who goes to see this is going to either recognize themselves as one of the characters in this family, or recognize people they know from their family,” she said.

Setting a course

For Castro Smith, who was born and raised in a Cuban family in Miami, the road to “Encanto” started with her career as a playwright, which was influenced by the work of another Latino writer.

While she performed her first shows as a young child, casting her younger brother in plays she wrote and would put on for her family, it was in high school when she read the play “Marisol,” by Puerto Rican playwright Jose Rivera, that Castro Smith could see a serious future for herself as a writer.

“It really changed everything for me. He’s a Puerto Rican writer and it just spoke to me in a way that was totally different than anything I had ever read before. And I thought if he can do it, maybe I can do it. So reading that play really set me on a course for the rest of my life,” she said.

But before she discovered his work Rivera said she remembers seeing very few Latino writers and entertainers in mainstream films and musicals, Castro Smith said.

“I remember being like eight years old thinking, ‘Do people that make movies just not know that we exist?’ I was legit confused and I think once I got a little older it became a real mission of mine and something really important to kind of bring our culture to the screen, bring diversity to the screen and tell those stories,” she said.

Female leads

After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Brown University, Castro Smith attended the Yale School of Drama and while studying acting in 2008 she wrote her first play “Estrella Cruz [The Junkyard Queen].”

“That play was very much about my mom. I was the first person in my family to leave home. It was a very big deal for me to leave Miami and go to college,” she said.  “And it was really hard for my family to understand why I made that choice at the time. So that play was really born out of that moment of where I was growing up and wanted to do different things,” she said.

Since then she has written five other plays inspired by a mix of genres such as Greek mythology and even some elements of horror and magic as well as her family and culture. But the uniting factor is always a strong female lead, she said.

“That’s something I feel really passionate about is putting complex, dynamic, female protagonists on the stage and on screen,” she said.

Her jump to TV came in 2015 when she made her Lifetime series “Devious Maids.” She was also a writer and producer on the Fox television series “The Exorcist” and the Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House.”

She was brought on as a writer on “Encanto” to collaborate with Bush, but about nine months into her gig she was asked to become a co-director.

“I think it’s risky to take a chance on someone new and to get outside your comfort zone, especially for a company that’s as big as Disney, and I give them a lot of credit for taking a chance on me and on this film,” she said.