Home » Latest » TRENDING NOW » Diane Guerrero, Stephanie Beatriz – What Else Can I Do? (From “Encanto”)

Diane Guerrero, Stephanie Beatriz – What Else Can I Do? (From “Encanto”)

4

InfoSearched 55 0 TRENDING NOW

8.5

SaveSavedRemoved 8

A cactus grows where a rose should be, and two Madrigal sisters finally tell each other the truth.

The official Disney Music VEVO video for “What Else Can I Do?” pairs Diane Guerrero, who voices Isabela Madrigal, with Stephanie Beatriz, who voices Mirabel, in the emotional centerpiece of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ “Encanto.” Written and composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda for the studio’s 60th animated feature, the song lands at the exact moment the family’s golden child stops performing perfection and starts growing whatever she actually wants. It’s a two-minute reconciliation dressed up as a botanical explosion, and it’s one of the most talked-about numbers on a soundtrack that dominated charts through the end of 2021.

• Diane Guerrero (Isabela) and Stephanie Beatriz (Mirabel) perform the duet, which Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and composed for “Encanto.”
• The sequence opens with Isabela accidentally sprouting a jagged cactus instead of her signature roses, the crack that exposes her resentment over an engagement she never wanted.
• Musically inspired by 1990s rock en Español, the number tracks Isabela producing wild flora — strangling figs, jacarandas, sundew, hanging vines, tabebuia, and palma de cera — as her dress gets stained with plant pigment before the sisters burst onto the town’s rooftops.

The Setup Inside Isabela’s Room

Every scene before this one has painted Isabela as the flawless Madrigal — the daughter whose gift produces nothing but perfect roses, and who’s been pushed toward marrying a man she doesn’t love because it keeps the family’s image intact. The argument that opens “What Else Can I Do?” cracks that image literally: instead of a rose, Isabela’s magic spits out a lopsided cactus in the middle of her flower-filled bedroom. It’s the first sign in the film that her gift was never actually about symmetry — that was a role she’d been assigned, not a limit on what she could grow.

Mirabel, the one Madrigal without a magical gift, is the one standing there when it happens. Rather than treating the cactus as an accident to cover up, she leans into it, pushing her sister to see what else might come out if she stops trying to control every bloom.

Two Voices, One Breakthrough

Beatriz’s Mirabel spends the song coaxing, not lecturing — she’s spontaneous and a little chaotic by nature, and that energy is what gives Isabela permission to be messy. Guerrero’s Isabela starts the track clipped and defensive and ends it laughing, covered in pollen and vines she never would have let grow a minute earlier. The vocal interplay tracks that arc beat for beat, moving from guarded harmony to full-throated, overlapping joy as the garden around them gets wilder.

Realizing her gift was never limited to symmetry and perfection, Isabela breaks free from her role as the family’s “golden child.”

By the song’s back half, Isabela isn’t just tolerating the mess — she’s generating it on purpose, filling the room and then the streets with strangling figs and jacarandas that have nothing to do with anyone’s expectations of her.

The Rock En Español Influence

Miranda built the track on a foundation of 1990s rock en Español, giving “What Else Can I Do?” a heavier, more electric backbone than the ballads elsewhere on the soundtrack. That choice mirrors the story on screen — this isn’t a delicate, polite number, it’s a release. The stained dress and the overgrown vines are the visual version of the same idea the music is doing underneath: control giving way to something loud and alive.

For readers curious how Miranda keeps landing these character-defining numbers across his catalog, the untold truth of Lin-Manuel Miranda traces the pattern back through his earlier work, long before Colombia and the Madrigals entered the picture.

Placement Within The Final Film

The reconciliation between Isabela and Mirabel doesn’t just patch up a sisterly grudge — inside the story, it briefly stabilizes the family’s fading miracle, one of several signs the Encanto’s magic is tied directly to how honestly the Madrigals treat each other. The song sits on the “Encanto” soundtrack, released November 19, 2021, by Walt Disney Records, which topped charts in the weeks that followed the film’s theatrical run.

Disney was leaning hard into 2022 with animated and live-action slates alike — around the same stretch, the studio was also building buzz for titles like Marvel Studios’ “Moon Knight” — but “Encanto” kept generating its own momentum well after opening weekend, largely on the strength of numbers like this one.

Isabela ends the song surrounded by flowers nobody asked her to grow, which is the whole point — nobody had to ask.