Sure, 'Encanto' has fun songs and a sweet story. But Germaine Franco made it groove

When Germaine Franco was a little girl, her fifth-grade music teacher gave her a choice. Presented with a picture of all the instruments in the orchestra, Franco pointed at her future. "I was only 10," she says, "and I was very adamant. I was asked, 'Oh, don't you want to play the flute? Don't you want to play the violin? Girls play the violin.' I said, 'Nope, I'm playing the drums.' "

The right music can make a movie sing, or make it groove. Franco's scores do both. There are, of course, plenty of singable songs in her latest project, the Disney animated musical Encanto: Lin-Manuel Miranda's genre-hopping songbook has blown up Billboard, with the sleeper hit "We Don't Talk About Bruno" becoming the highest-charting song from a Disney animated film since Aladdin's "A Whole New World" in 1993. But the pulse of the film belongs to Franco, whose instrumental score bops with cumbia, joropo and other high-energy Colombian rhythms, carried by a battery of traditional Latin American instruments.

This month, that score made Franco an Oscar nominee — putting), industry titan of the past 35 years, as well as Nicholas Britell () and Jonny Greenwood (), two of the 21st century's "it" composers. She is, incredibly, woman in Academy Award history to be nominated for best original score, and the first Latina. More than that, is Disney Animation's first feature to be scored by a woman — .