Wish review: This kingdom really needs some magic
Disney's latest animated effort plays more like a corporate anxiety attack than a 100th-anniversary celebration
Film Reviews Wish
It was probably inevitable that Marvel’s world-building virus would infect its Disney host. But it’s still startling to see how urgently the new Disney animated fairy tale Wish attempts to retcon 86 years of disparate animated features into something like a shared universe—one where Peter Pan, Thumper, and Pinocchio exist in semi-related plotlines, just like Black Widow, Moon Knight, and the High Evolutionary do.
The mechanism for this multiversal shift is a hoary old Disney plot cliché that Wish wants to reframe as a trope: the “Wishing Star,” made famous by Jiminy Cricket’s rendition of the lovely corporate theme song “When You Wish Upon A Star” in Pinocchio way back in 1940. Like the song says, when you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are, your dreams come true.
Or not, in the case of Wish, where an initially well-intended sorcerer king named Magnifico (voiced by Chris Pine) hoards other people’s fantasies. He does this for benevolent reasons that are hermetic and vague in the way only stories reverse-engineered to fit a high-concept premise can be. Magnifico was traumatized by a war that wiped out his family, and for some reason, he believes stability will reign supreme if he excises people’s secret wishes from their psyches and imprisons those desires in floating bubbles.
We see quite a few of the fantasies Magnifico’s subjects harbor in their secret hearts, and it’s hard to understand what the sorcerer-king is going on about, because nobody in his kingdom has an id. His people want to fly. They want to be strong. They want to talk to animals. They want to write a song everybody will dance to. They dream of having a family. A more stable community would be hard to imagine, because its wishes are not for sex, power, or anything else that would destabilize a kingdom, or even hurt a fly. In Rosas, a kingdom “located off the Iberian Peninsula” as the press notes say, the people all dream Disney.
None of this stops plucky young heroine Asha (Ariana Debose) from taking on the mantle of wish-liberator. In one of dozens of callbacks to classic Disney material, Asha interviews to become Magnifico’s “sorcerer’s apprentice.” Taken into Magnifico’s wish chamber, Asha sees the hopes of her community imprisoned there, and immediately knows This Is Very Wrong.
Asha’s special purpose becomes giving the people what they want, or at least restoring their ability to know they once wanted it. She wishes on a star, like Geppetto, and the star manifests as a plush toy snuggle trap so clearly ripping off the Lumas in Super Mario Galaxy that Disney has invented a backstory about how “Star’s” design originated in unused sketch art from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (yeah, sure). With Star giggling and spraying Disney dust all around, Asha and her plucky band of misfits plot their assault on Magnifico, and his virtually undefended fortress of dreams, inventing the talking animal and something meant to be Peter Pan in the process.
Wish is a mess, but there are ways it could be called an innovative one. In honor of the Disney centennial, co-directors Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck conceived Wish as an homage to the vintage 2-D look of the hand-painted Walt Disney classics, and as a result, the backgrounds and scenic design have the stippled look of watercolors painted on rough canvas. Unlike the Broadway-ready tunes of Frozen or The Little Mermaid, the song score by pop star Julia Michaels and collaborator Benjamin Rice is aimed squarely at the Soundscan and Billboard charts, a trend begun by Frozen 2 and fully embraced here. Most significantly, Wish is a Disney fairytale set in a world that isn’t derived from a fairy tale source. The lore here is adapted from old Disney product, and the fairy tale references are to movies based on folk tales, not to the folk tales themselves.
Everything seems political nowadays, so there’s probably somebody somewhere who’s going to see Wish as an allegory about Terrible Trumpism vs. Collective Action, or Big Bad Bidenism and how to overthrow the Socialist Grey State. But Wish mainly, and in some ways unintentionally, occupies a substrata of Disney projects mounted over the last decade that are a rumination on corporate purpose.
You may not have seen Disney flicks like Saving Mr. Banks, or Tomorrowland, or Christopher Robin, and if you did, they maybe just felt like middle-of-the-road movies. But the people who make Disney products frequently grew up as diehard fans, and they’re sophisticated enough to know the wider culture can be skeptical about the Pollyanna-isms of the Disney canon. Wish is yet another movie that says we need our dreams, and that it’s heroic as well as intellectually defensible for Disney to choose wish fulfillment as its corporate and artistic purpose.
Nobody on this project seems to realize how Magnifico, in his mad quest to harvest, draw power from, and selectively regurgitate the dreams of his followers, stands in for The Walt Disney Company more ably than heroine Asha ever could. Disney’s entire growth strategy over the last 20 years has been to absorb fantasies made by others—the Muppets, Pixar Animation, Marvel Entertainment, The Simpsons, Lucasfilm. While there’s no doubt the makers of Wish see themselves as dream liberators and not dream takers, Disney is like Magnifico—a monopolist, besieged by an audience increasingly empowered to seek its pleasures in a world of unlimited choice.
Like George Lucas before them, the modern Disney creators are increasingly making movies about the overthrow of the empire, while ceaselessly dedicating themselves to the empire itself. Though Wish is a wobbly monument to a glorious century of artistic commercial achievement, the anxiety it masks behind the usual palette of color and song feels almost too real.
57 Comments
I wish Disney would make a good movie.
Encanto was only a couple years ago.
I said a good movie.
Encanto was only a couple years ago.
I hear “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” so much it may as well have come out yesterday. I concede nothing!
By stealing the buzzword Gen-Z like to use today. Encanto is Mid at best.
Ah, I see. You are correct. Those are great movies, not just good movies.
Yes, and your taste on animated films now is entirely suspect. Anything you recommend I’d need multiple other sources to make sure the opinion is correct.
Gotta’ let the hivemind make your opinion for you, I guess.
Good point, Encanto was a great movie.
Moana was late 2016, not that long ago in film production time and its fantastic.
Moana truly is a great movie. And it’s going to be ruined by the live action remake they are forcing upon us already.
I hear they aren’t even going to hire a real demigod to play Maui! So they’ll be guilty of the sin of “godface” when they make a mere mortal play that role.
Moana gets better every time I’ve seen it, and with two young kids in the house, I’ve seen it a lot. It’s up there with just about anything else in the Disney canon.
How does a movie get ruined by something you will never have to watch?
I will never understand these kind of arguments.
The same with Ghostbusters, Lion King or any other movie with a remake…all got “ruined” by the new movies, except…no…they weren’t. Literally nothing happend to them.
Hell, in case of Ghostbuster it even revived a until then dead franchise that had the last series (extreme ghostbusters) almost two decades ago.
I just saw it yesterday and yes, not very great. The talking animal sidekick is very ham-fisted and literally has no actual character; just primed to be made into a stuffed animal.
I saw the trailer and I knew I recognized the voice from somewhere. It’s Alan Tudyk, but not JUST Alan Tudyk…it’s note for note his Clayface voice from Harley Quinn.
Alan Tudyk got a paycheck and that’s all that matters.
When he says “I found it with my butt” in the trailer, I had to laugh. I guess I’m the target audience. I’m easy.
I want a K-2SO show with Tudyk reprising the role. Either set before Rogue One, or maybe his personality was backed up and downloaded into a new droid body.
If I was Disney I’d buy this pitch yesterday!
So you’re saying it’s more Wish.com than Wish?
i get the impetus to make a movie celebrating yourself after 100 years, and i can sort of understand the logic of being like ‘hey what if the wishing star is the same wishing star in every movie’ in a dumb, schoolyard logic way. but like…you need more than that to make a movie.lightyear proved that brand recognition alone can’t sell a movie, and this seems to be even more dedicated to brand recognition. i feel like we’ll get good, interesting movies within 5 years or so. this is the classic up and down disney cycle. this is this generation’s ‘home on the range’.
You know, you’re right. I haven’t been this annoyed at a Disney film since “Home on the Range”. Hope your theory proves to be right and this will all turn around.
Well, we’re still seeing it this weekend. Not much else out for a 4-year-old! At least the Alamo just opened so I can have a cocktail.
You can also… not see it. Why give your money to a corporation that makes bad products you know are bad ?
Or not give a fuck about this kind of bullshit and go to a movie your child will still have fun and a good time.
You’re very eloquent for a four-year-old. Should you be drinking though?
I imagine “Not much else out for a 4-year-old” is at the top of every internal Disney Pictures slide deck
Your four year old might like Napoleon.
Like most 4 year olds, they’ll complain that Kubrick had the better vision.
Well this is all terribly disappointing. I was hoping for the best as the semi 2d animation style was a nice throwback and good lord its been 13 years since Donna Murphy sang Listen to Your Mother as an out and out Disney Villain Song (Unless you count Shiny from Moana which I will allow). Pity, pity pity pity it all seems to be in service of a mess.
You lie!*checks Wikipedia*Jesus Christ, Tangled really did come out in 2010.
Shiny is so good. Jemaine Clement should do more stuff. Although I imagine he does.
Disney needs to clean house and start over.
“Everything seems political nowadays” – I thought this was only uttered by right-wingers afraid of diversity, so sad to see it in this review. EVERYTHING has always been political I’m afraid. In Disney, the good guys always act for the helpless and the bad guys always want power and money. That is a political view. Nothing new is here.
my take from that paragraph was that this is such missmatch of corporate products that it need really big stretches from the audience to become about something political. its shallow and with nothing to say being the message
No. Even very conservative people (like Walt Disney himself) believe in the concept of “good” and “evil” and that heroes help the helpless. That’s not political. What gets political is when people map these things into the real world, because real life isn’t that simple and one side’s heroes are another’s villains.
of “good” and “evil” and that heroes help the helpless. That’s not political.
Sure, it is. How do you define good and evil? If good means helping the helpless, then who are the helpless, and how do we help them? People have never fully agreed on those details, and that disagreement is one of the reasons politics exist. Every story has always been political. That’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just how humans work.
Sure, it is. How do you define good and evil? If good means helping the helpless, then who are the helpless, and how do we help them? People have never fully agreed on those details, and that disagreement is one of the reasons politics exist. That’s my point. I’m arguing with the idea that Ken had that was claiming that good vs evil stories were political “because everything is political”. This only seems the case if you imagine (which unfortunately a lot of people do whatever their politics are) that their political opponents aren’t just misguided, but are actually intending to “be evil”. If everybody watches a Disney movie and sees themselves as the heroes and their opponents as the villains (as they do), then you can’t say a story is “political”.
Tolkien had it right when he talked about the difference between allegory and applicability — allegory is when the point of the story is to be a metaphor for the real world — “Animal Farm” is an allegory for the Soviet Revolution and its take over by Stalin. But LOTR isn’t an allegory for anything according to Tolkien. You can “apply” it to something in the real world, but the meaning you apply is on you, not on the story.
He rejected allegory in the sense of any kind of 1-to-1 analogy but that doesn’t mean his choices in LotR and The Hobbit don’t reflect his worldview. The fears of industrialization tearing apart the world, the longing for a pastoral simplicity, the view of war as a thing that leaves scars that can’t always be seen, as well as the landscape being transformed by the people… it’s a complicated bunch of themes that can’t be neatly mapped to our concepts of left-wing or right-wing ideology but can be seen as a kind of small-c conservatism that yearns for tradition but is also skeptical of the relentless drive of modern capitalism.Saying all art is political doesn’t mean it all neatly fits into modern right vs. left frameworks, just that inevitably, the ways a writer or director or artist sees the world will impact their work. And in cases like this where a work has been filtered through many committees you inevitably get a muddled perspective where it doesn’t mean to say anything, but can reveal what the company considers sufficiently non-provocative.
I dunno, there’s a lot of strains of conservatism which view weakness and helplessness as things to be held in contempt and why don’t you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, etc. A lot of times you’ll see stories taking pains to establish that the “weak” are Hard Working Virtuous Folk who are worthy of the help given to them or that people have been misled into not being happy with their lot.
Exactly. After all what is politics but discussions concerning how do we want to live, how do we get our resources, how do we treat our neighbors, etc.
Sounds like every fairy tale ever written.
The problem isn’t that current movies are political- as you say, movies have always had political viewpoints.
The current problem is that they’re often just not very good movies, and it’s often because the people making them are more concerned with about the politics they’re trying to convey than they are with making a story that’s interesting and emotionally impactful.
I believe if you read carefully you’ll see that what they’re saying is that there are people who will try to read deep meanings into this movie (since Disney movies usually do have them behind the basic story), but in this case they really shouldn’t be, because there is no deeper meaning in this movie, the whole thing is just Disney jerking themselves off.
Kudos on an excellently-written review, Ray. I haven’t seen the movie and don’t really plan to, but I’m tickled by the concept that Disney made a movie where it thinks it’s the hero but it’s actually the villain.
His people want to fly. They want to be strong. They want to talk to animals. They want to write a song everybody will dance to. They dream of having a family. A more stable community would be hard to imagine, because its wishes are not for sex, power, or anything else that would destabilize a kingdom, or even hurt a fly.Somebody wished for Song of the South. Just saying.
Crazy how the movie that looks like a pitcher of piss doesn’t seem to be doing that well.
After watching the trailer, my daughter said the animation looked uglier than Sofia the First, a 10+ year old Disney Junior show which prioritized a high volume of content output over visual refinement. It’s hard to argue with her.
Disney presents: Super Mario RPG
The only animated movie musical about a wishing star I care about is Wakko’s Wish.
I’m a big Disney animation fan and, yes, this is easily their weakest theatrical film since Chicken Little or Dinosaur. The songs are duds, the characters are one note (or less – how did the company which made a flying carpet an expressive character bomb so badly with Star?), and the whole plot makes very little sense (seriously, no one has noticed that he’s a dream-stealing tyrant before now?). I like the idea of the animation style mixing old school and new school but it never looks right.
The stars are such exact Luma replicas I assumed Disney was licensing them from Nintendo. I mean damn. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lawsuit is forthcoming.
Asha: Why wouldn’t you just grant everyone’s wishes?
Magnifico: Because I’m Chris Pine, and I saw how that worked out in “Wonder Woman 1984.”The weirdest thing about this movie to me is how Disney, through it, chooses which parts of the last century it wants to acknowledge and celebrate, and which ones it doesn’t. All of Asha’s friends are analogs of the Seven Dwarfs, there are several direct references to Peter Pan, Bambi, Thumper, and Little John, and the evil green magic just screams Maleficent. But the most direct bit is during the credits, where there are star-outlined designs of characters from *almost* every Disney Animation Studios film. None of the sequels are directly referenced, which I guess makes sense, but curiously, there is no avatar from any of the wartime anthologies save for Ichabod Crane, the Rescuers are completely left out, and so is “Black Cauldron.” I mean, “Home on the Range” gets a stellar shout out, but no love for Bernard and Bianca, the Three Caballeros, or Gurgi? I know they weren’t rousing successes, but they didn’t actively suck out loud nearly as much as Roseanne Barr the Cow did. Hand on the Bible, Disney, are you really more ashamed of “The Black Cauldron” than you are of “Chicken Little?” Because if so… that might explain a LOT.
At a stretch: perhaps Disney have let their adaptation rights for The Rescuers and Black Cauldron lapse, and couldn’t include them?