What Else Can I Do?

"What Else Can I Do?" from Encanto: Luisa's Sister, the Garden, and a Song About Agency

"What Else Can I Do?" is a musical theater song written by Lin-Manuel Miranda for Disney's animated feature film Encanto, released in November 2021. The song is performed in the film by Isabela Madrigal, voiced and sung by Diane Guerrero, with additional contributions from Stephanie Beatriz as Mirabel. It appears during a pivotal scene in the second act of the film in which Isabela, the eldest Madrigal granddaughter whose magical gift allows her to grow flowers and plants, begins to discover that she can also create wild, unexpected, imperfect forms of plant life beyond the conventional roses she has always been required to produce. The moment marks a transformation in her character and in her understanding of her own power.

The film Encanto, directed by Byron Howard and Jared Bush with co-direction by Charise Castro Smith, tells the story of the Madrigal family, who live in a magical house in the Colombian mountains called the Encanto. Each member of the family, except the protagonist Mirabel, has been gifted with a unique magical power. Isabela's gift of making flowers grow has resulted in her being positioned as the perfect, beautiful eldest daughter, a role she has occupied without question but with increasing internal strain. "What Else Can I Do?" is the song that articulates and then begins to resolve that strain, representing one of the clearest expressions of the film's central theme about the costs of performing perfection.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote all of the original songs for the film while the score was composed by Germaine Franco, drew on a range of Latin musical influences that reflected the Colombian setting and the diverse rhythmic traditions of that country's musical heritage. "What Else Can I Do?" incorporates cumbia-influenced rhythms and the kind of accelerating, ecstatic energy that suits a character discovering herself for the first time. The song's structure builds from a tentative opening to an exuberant concluding section in which Isabela's vocal performance and the visual environment of the film's animation expand together in a single sustained expression of liberation.

Diane Guerrero, best known for her acting roles in Orange Is the New Black and Doom Patrol, provided a vocal performance that captured both the initial restraint of Isabela's trained perfection and the opening up that the song demands. Her voice handles the song's dynamic range with assurance, and the contrast between the controlled tone of the opening and the freer quality of the later sections mirrors Isabela's emotional arc precisely. Stephanie Beatriz, who had already delivered the film's breakout vocal performance with "What I Know About You" and the reprise of "Surface Pressure," appears in supporting capacity here, her presence connecting this song to the broader narrative of sisterly reconciliation that drives the second act.

The song appeared on the Encanto soundtrack album, released by Walt Disney Records on November 19, 2021. That album became one of the most commercially successful animated film soundtracks in recent memory, driven primarily by "We Don't Talk About Bruno," which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 2022 and held that position for an extended run. "What Else Can I Do?" benefited from the enormous attention the film and its soundtrack received, charting on the Hot 100 as part of a remarkable situation in which multiple songs from a single film occupied the chart simultaneously.

The Billboard Hot 100 performance of the Encanto songs collectively represented an unprecedented moment for animated film music. "We Don't Talk About Bruno" broke the record previously held by "Let It Go" from Frozen for the highest-charting Disney animated film song, and the success of "What Else Can I Do?" along with other album tracks demonstrated that the film's music functioned as a genuine pop cultural moment rather than simply as film-contextual music. Streaming numbers drove this performance, as families and children listened repeatedly to the soundtrack on platforms where stream counts translated directly into chart positions.

The film received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony in March 2022, validating the critical consensus that had developed around it in the months following its release. The Grammy Awards also recognized the album's impact. Miranda's contributions to contemporary musical theater and film music, already extensively documented through Hamilton and In the Heights, received further recognition through the film's success, with "What Else Can I Do?" standing as one of the more structurally sophisticated songs in the film's lineup.

The animation accompanying the song, in which Isabela's gift manifests as increasingly wild and exuberant plant growth including cacti, explosions of color, and forms that have no conventional beauty, is one of the visual highlights of the film and works in close concert with the song's emotional and thematic content. The design team at Walt Disney Animation Studios created sequences that translated the song's internal emotional logic into visual form with unusual precision, making the song and its imagery inseparable in the way the best musical theater integrations achieve.

Culturally, "What Else Can I Do?" resonated with audiences who saw in Isabela's story a reflection of pressures related to family expectation, performance of perfection, and the discovery of selfhood beyond externally imposed roles. The Colombian setting gave the story cultural specificity that was widely praised as a step forward in representation for Latin American communities, and the emotional universality of the themes ensured that the film and its songs reached well beyond any single demographic.