Reviews WesternAnimation / Wish 2023

100 Years of Disney Led to THIS?

Back in 2009, Disney's The Princess and the Frog cynically - and satisfyingly - deconstructed and reconstructed the company's most prevailing refrain. "I thought wishing on stars was for babies and crazy people", that movie said. Then 14 years later we get Wish, that tries to repeat the conversation about wishing on stars, without the wit or wisdom.

The prevailing view of Wish is that it is an astonishingly bland movie, to the extent that it looks a lot like an AI chewed up and regurgitated Disney's past works. I am confident AI played no part, the lifelessness can be blamed on Disney's mandate to produce the safest, least unambitious animated movie to celebrate its 100 year anniversary. The brief seemed to have been, "make a movie in which the words, 'Wish', 'star' and 'dream' are repeated fifty times. The rest doesn't matter."

Wish follows Asha, who aspires to become apprentice to the all powerful sorcerer, King, and show-boater Magnifico. Magnifico is beloved by his people because he magically grants the wishes of his subjects, but Asha quickly learns there is a dark side to the sorcerer's benevolent rule.

The mechanics of how wishes are granted by Magnifico need expanding on. People remove their greatest heart's wish from their body and into a glass bauble to hand it to Magnifico, which causes them to forget what the wish was. The pinch is that Magnifico only grants a handful of the safest, most banal wishes that pose no risk to his authority, and he locks away the rest indefinitely, preventing anyone from pursuing their ambitions by themselves (or even knowing what they were). Whilst the implications of this are interesting, it is a blatant contrivance, and exactly what I would expect from the same screenwriters who gave us the, "we can cure ice related injuries but only by erasing memories" plot point from Frozen.

Much is made of the unique art style to Wish. The best thing I can say is that it is the most experimental thing about this movie. But it is a failed experiment that makes an undoubtably expensive movie look cheap. 3D characters flutter over painted 2D backgrounds in a way that is constantly distracting, and gives the impression of a weirdly flat world. The rest of the movie, the songs, the characters, the dialogue, are unremarkable. Magnifico is the only stand out element of the movie, especially as it has been a while since we've had a standard Disney villain who is so transparently evil for evil's sake.

Wish is not painful to watch. It deserves that faint praise at least. But it will make me suffer all the same, as I'm doomed to watch it many, many times before my three year old finally gets over it and moves onto something else.