Encanto won Best Animated Feature at this year’s Oscars. In the story, the Madrigals’ matriarch, Alma, has lost her husband in a war years earlier, but also acquired a mysterious ‘miracle’ which endows her offspring with ‘gifts’: powers that they use to help the community. All seems well until Alma’s granddaughter, Mirabel, fails to receive a ‘gift’, and then discovers her relatives are losing theirs.

When she saw the film, Conroy immediately spotted an allegory for her own research field. “I never expected to write a scientific paper about Encanto, but the film has trauma written all over it,” she said.

Intergenerational trauma, has been described as “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding that is transmitted from one generation to the next”, and according to psychologists can affect families or entire communities.

Research has shown, for example, that parents who have endured armed conflict, displacement, or abuse, often ‘encrypt’ their distress in behaviours that their children may come to replicate or model. The children may, for example, respond aggressively in specific situations, or experience depression and anxiety. Equally, intergenerational trauma can manifest itself in less-obvious behaviours, such as an unhealthy tendency to overwork.

Conroy argues that the story in Encanto reflects the therapist Stephi Wagner’s memorable observation: “pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it”. The family’s ‘gifts’ allow Alma to construct a vision of the Madrigals as strong, focused and responsible which most of her children readily accept. In reality, this is papering over their emotional response to a painful past, which they only confront when Mirabel forces them to do so.

Conroy also shows how the different characters fit real-life archetypes that are common within traumatised families.

Mirabel’s sisters, Luisa and Isabella, falsely play up to skin-deep roles as ‘the strong one’ or the ‘golden child’ as part of the family’s collective coping mechanism. Similarly, Bruno, who has rejected the family’s mythology, is its proverbial ‘black sheep’.

Encanto is not the only recent Disney movie that attempts to address psychological complexity. Inside Out dealt with difficult emotions; Coco with family relations, grief and death; and Soul with ideas about meaning and purpose.

Conroy argues that the films could be used by therapists to help children talk about and work through problems.

Her own field, play therapy, takes advantage of games, play and make-believe as a ‘language’ through which children often express thoughts and feelings that they might otherwise suppress.

Similarly, clips and songs from films such as Encanto could become a ‘companion tool’ for child therapists. Mental health professionals, she suggests, could use the stories from the films, or miniatures of the characters, to support children processing their own inner world.

Although one-to-one therapy is the ‘gold standard’ in mental healthcare, the paper stresses that films and songs which children can enjoy with their families away from these weekly sessions could play an important role in healing the psychological scars caused by collective trauma. Conroy’s wider, emerging research on the mental health impacts of the pandemic suggests that a mix of approaches is only likely to grow in importance. “We keep hearing that children are bouncing back after the pandemic, but many therapists would dispute that,” she said. “We may not see widespread, PTSD-like responses in the years to come, but there may well be more subtle psychological effects. We need to be open to using any effective approaches available to help children overcome the damage and distress the pandemic caused. Society is telling them that things are normal again, but some still feel quite the reverse.”