Released: 26th December
Seen: 17th December (Advanced Screening)
In 1923, Walt and Roy Disney founded a little company called the Disney Brothers Studio to produce a small series of Alice in Wonderland cartoons. A few years later the company would be renamed Walt Disney Studios and a little cartoon called Steamboat Willie (which is soon gonna be public domain… so look forward to how that’ll be used!) would not only become the first cartoon with synchronized sound but essentially transform the company into a household name. They would go on to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the first animated feature-length film which would begin a long several decades as the most well-known and influential animation company on the planet.
Nowadays Disney owns pretty much all of pop culture, not only through their own vast library but through the purchase of Star Wars, The Marvel Universe, and Fox Entertainment. From humble beginnings, a behemoth of undeniable proportions has grown and turned into an entity that cannot be stopped even if every film they release from now on completely fails at the box office… and to celebrate 100 years of cinematic domination, Disney released Wish. which wishes it was worth more than it ended up being.
Wish follows a young girl named Asha (Ariana Debose), an eager young girl who lives in the island town of Rosas where she gives tours to new arrivals. During those tours, she tells them the history of Rosas, which pretty much revolves around the great King Magnifico (Chris Pine) who founded the town and keeps everyone safe with his great magic. Part of the process of living on Rosas is that King Magnifico pulls out your heart’s greatest wish and keeps it safe in his tower, ensuring that it will always be there and every now and then even granting one of them… of course, that’s how it seems at first.
While trying to get a position as King Magnifico’s apprentice, Asha learns that part of the way that Magnifico judges what wishes he’ll grant is if they run any risk to him, making it clear he’s actually a selfish ruler who doesn’t actually care about his subjects and just commands undying loyalty. Asha soon runs into a magic wishing star and decides that, with its help, she’ll set the town’s wishes free so everyone can have a chance to accomplish their wishes on their own. Hopefully, she can do that before King Magnifico gives himself fully over to dark magic to stop her.
Wish operates basically as Disney throwing itself a big anniversary party, a film designed to call back on the last 100 years of Disney entertainment and celebrate its many accomplishments. This might be why some people have joked that the film is written by AI because a lot of the film pointedly references previous works in the Disney canon. The film itself is littered with references that range from the subtle (such as all of Asha’s friends being inspired by the original Seven Dwarves) to the blunt (Peter Pan just flat out turns up in the final scene… like, they call him Peter, it’s that obvious) and the problem is that it probably needed to be even more blunt about what it’s doing to work.
The subtle nods that go throughout Wish are cute and all, it’s going to make a very fun video essay in about a year when someone goes through and explores them all in great detail but the problem comes when the film is a little more blunt. It leads to a kind of strange tonal whiplash, it’s trying to be something new and original but also be incredibly self-referential and that’s a hard balance to pull off at the best of times. Honestly, it might’ve been better for the film if they had just gone all in on the nostalgia since that’s basically what this film exists for.
Wish is first and foremost meant to play around in your nostalgia centre (you can tell because they literally show images of almost every animated Disney film ever made throughout the credits, it’s not subtle about what they’re doing here) and the problem is that sometimes when you’re too subtle about it your nods feel underdeveloped. You can certainly tell when something is meant to be a nod to a previous work, but it’s so strangely done that you can’t tell what they’re doing. Hell, you can’t even tell that the main friends are meant to be the Seven Dwarves until one of them literally says that they’re grumpy all the time. It’s subtle, but it’s too damn subtle for the target audience and for what it was trying to accomplish.
Then there are just the general problems that Wish has as its own film, like how the animation looks like it’s somewhere between 2D and 3D. There are ways to make this work, there’s been a lot of films that manage to pull this blend off (The Charlie Brown Movie or the Captain Underpants movie come to mind) but this one just doesn’t seem to work. It feels like it wanted to be a hand-drawn animation, it feels like they wanted to be closer to that end of the animation spectrum but because that kind of animation is effectively dead they had to come up with an approximation of it in 3D and you can feel the film wanting to just flatten everything and look like a classic Disney movie. That’s not to say it’s not a pretty-looking film, there’s a lot about it that’s visually pleasant to look at and the animation of the star, in particular, is quite cute but it doesn’t feel like it’s the kind of animation that this story needed… not helped by the film literally opening on the classic storybook imagery from some of the earliest Disney films, an opening that makes you instantly expect to see some classic animation.
Speaking of things that don’t fit, a lot of the songs just feel far too modern. Most of the songs are forgettable and feel shoved in because they need songs at certain points and not for any other reason. Sure, the songs are well performed, most of them are sung by Ariana Debose and that woman could sing literally anything and it’d be worth a listen, but none of them are catchy or memorable or feel particularly Disney-esque. The closest thing to a song that works is This Is The Thanks I Get, a villain song that actually shows us a man in power slowly succumbing to his own ego and getting more and more assured that he’s right about everything. It’s big and over the top and fun enough that it mostly works, everything else is kind of just dull and could be in any modern musical. I’m just saying that if they had gotten someone like Alan Menkin to handle the music, we might have something here. As it is we have songs that are nice, but they don’t belong in a film meant to honour the history of Disney.
That’s kind of where all the problems with Wish lie, it’s a film meant to look back over a century of cinema and go “Wow, we did something cool” but it doesn’t do that anywhere near as well as it should. It’s nostalgia by someone who worries they’ll be made fun of for being nostalgic, except that’s the entire reason to make this film. Just lean into it, go for broke, be self-referential and silly about it. The best moments are when the film just bluntly references a Disney film, be it a great Mary Poppins joke, an entire sequence directly lifting from Alice in Wonderland or the previously mentioned Peter Pan appearance. When this film actually does the thing it clearly wants to do, it has something there but it holds back so much that it can’t have anywhere near as much fun as it should.
Wish is certainly a fine enough film, a sweet treat with some fun moments to it but considering what it obviously wants to be, it feels like a letdown. You can feel the film fighting itself, trying to hold back what could’ve made it a celebration. This is a milestone absolutely worthy of celebration, 100 years of being a beloved icon that people still adore despite endless controversies is no easy feat. Disney is that company that everyone loves and everyone hates, but we can never get away from it because there’s a special kind of magic that pulls us in. Wish was meant to celebrate that special magic, instead, it just alludes to something that used to be special and hopes that’s enough. It’s still not bad, but I truly wish it was a lot better.
Movie Meister Reviews 