Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Vivo

For his third directorial effort, screenwriter Kirk DeMicco takes audiences from the streets of Havana, Cuba to the vibrant nightlife of Miami, Florida by way of sunny Key West. From the musical mind of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the film gives us an array of wonderful new songs for the likes of Miranda and Gloria Estefan to sing with a number of fascinating characters and situations surrounding them.

The story starts off with a street musician named Andrés (Juan de Marcos González) whose trained kinkajou assistant Vivo (Miranda) helps him thrill and entertain crowds each day at a busy fountain in Havana. Andrés receives an invitation from an old friend, celebrated singer Marta Sandoval (Estefan) to join her in Miami for her farewell performance. He decides then that it’s time to see her again and tell her what he longed to tell her so long ago, that he loves her. However, his passing leaves a distraught Vivo adrift with a song that Andrés wrote for her and a desire to grant Andrés his final wish and deliver the song into her hands. When his nephew’s daughter Rosa (Zoe Saldana) arrives with her daughter Gabi (Ynairaly Simo) in tow, he hatches a plan to stow away with her and find his way to Miami, a plan that expectedly goes awry.

Watching Vivo will instantly transport you back to the great Disney animated adventures we once got on a regular basis. While the film uses a not particularly interesting computer-generated modeling for its characters, there are throwback sequences set to music that recall Disney’s two-dimensional mastery, a welcome sight for any Disney-phile. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score fills itself with that Latin sound that Estefan helped bring to a global audience, an interesting symbolic reference the film makes to its roots. Miranda’s songs are lively and fit well into the film’s various sequences thanks to the artists’ creative energy, but only two of the songs really stand out from the rest, “My Own Drum,” which Gabi sings to celebrate her individuality and “Love’s Gonna Pick You Up” sung by a pair of spoonbills Vivo helps fall in love.

If you’ve ever enjoyed Estefan or Miranda’s work, the resultant feature surrounding them is an aural pleasure blending her soaring, richly texture vocals with Miranda’s rapid-fire delivery. It’s an interesting dichotomy that’s surprisingly well blended in a film that feels both fresh and familiar.