Happily, and gratefully, this is a film clearly made by people who both adore its 60-year-old predecessor and still saw 21st-century room for improvement.

Upon leaving my screening of Encanto, I was convinced that I had just seen my favorite animated Disney movie since 2016's Zootopia, the Oscar-winning comedy that, maybe not coincidentally, was also co-directed by the new film's Jared Bush and Byron Howard. But when I tried thinking back to the animated Disney musical that I most loved prior to Encanto, I drew a blank.

Belfast's overall tone is child's-view fanciful – a rose-tinted (albeit mostly black-and-white) love letter to the formative people and places of Kenneth Branagh's youth – but with added dollops of painful real-world experience that make for an awkward, not entirely successful blend. The movie is oftentimes touching and funny, and I was continually engaged. I just never quite bought what its writer/director was selling.

Had the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's holiday production Winter Wonderland been staged last year as originally intended, it would have marked a significant anniversary, given that it would have been 20 years since the previous version of this Christmas-themed musical revue debuted on the Rock Island stage. But with the dinner theatre closed for the holidays in 2020, Winter Wonderland, running November 10 through December 29, is now returning to Circa '21 – in altered form – for this year's yuletide season instead. And although a 21st-anniversary presentation may not have the marketing value of a 20th-, staging the revue in 2021 does provide a different number to celebrate.