Disney's Abysmal New Animated Film Wish is Bad Branding Masquerading as Entertainment
You'll "wish" that you were seeing a different movie! This one sucks!
If you were to create a powerful yet lazy AI engine trained on classic and contemporary Disney feature films and had it write a screenplay, chances are good that it would feel more than a little like the lackluster blueprint for Wish.
It’s an exhausted and exhausting exploration of the usual kiddie film hogwash that feels like they put one hundred years of Disney animation in a blender, set it on high and then released the slushy product to movie theaters as the studio’s latest triumph.
It all just feels so generic, like it might as well have been titled Disney Animated Movie About a Spirited Young Girl With Special Powers in a Fantastical Land Following Dreams, though Wish has only slightly more personality.
The visually dull and thematically inert stinker takes place in a magical, tragical land called Rosas where a powerful wizard known as King Magnifico (Chris Pine) rules alongside his queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral).
King Magnifico, and King Magnifico alone, has the power to grant wishes, which take the physical form of glowing, radiant balls of potential. The people of Rosas give up their dreams to the King, at which point they forget them and every once in a while the King will have a big ceremony where he grants some lucky souls their fondest wishes.
In a shocking development, a sneering, white, straight man with all of the power in the universe does not use that unholy power entirely for good. Or even mostly for good. Or even for good at all.
In another turn that will surprise only people who have never seen a film of any sorts, or entertainment of any kind, an ultra-powerful wizard monarch turns out to be exactly the baddie you immediately peg him to be.
This saddens Plucky Disney Heroine 274, or Asha, as she is known here. Imagine Moana or Encanto’s Mirabel Madrigal but without everything that made those characters entertaining and memorable and you have Asha, who, again, looks like what an AI would come up with a prompt like “Modern Disney Princess.”
Disney has posited Wish as the origin story of the star that Pinocchio famously wished upon in Pinocchio. Thank God! I’ve been sending them letters, daily, begging them to provide an all-important origin story for a star from an old song. They’ve finally granted my wish. #Wordplay
The movie is littered with easter eggs and cameos and appearances from a plethora of classic characters from movies you grew up loving.
That means that you can very briefly see characters from some of the greatest Disney movies ever made in one of its laziest, sloppiest, most derivative and formulaic efforts.
Plucky Disney Heroine 274 wishes upon a star. That star takes the oppressively adorable form of a giggling, laughing, perpetually chipper magical being who looks enough like video game icon Kirby to be potentially legally actionable.
I like cute things. Hell, I LOVE cute things. I’m absolutely mad about them but the giggling, golden star left me totally cold. It feels like it was created in an antiseptic laboratory designed to create the cutest character known to man.
Star isn’t just cute; she’s too cute. She’s nauseatingly, excessively cute. Plucky Disney Heroine 274 becomes fast friends with the star. She picks up a sidekick in the form of Effete Disney Comic Relief Talking Animal Sidekick 137, a goat with a LOT of attitude. And sass! You better tell it to the hand because this goat’s sassy face ain’t listening! He’s probably too busy eating cans or something.
Plucky Disney Heroine 274 and Effete Disney Comic Relief Talking Animal Sidekick 137 then embark on a Joseph Campbell-style quest to expose the King, his lies and his increasing addiction to dark magic that makes him even more powerful but also more evil and unhinged.
Will the good guys win? Will the bad guys lose? Will the good guys and bad guys sing a series of interchangeable, sub-par songs while winning and losing? The answer won’t surprise you.
Wish was designed as a victory lap for an American institution very loudly and publicly celebrating its one hundredth birthday that is supposed to represent the ultimate Disney cartoon.
Disney has seldom, if ever, been so woefully devoid of awe and wonder and imagination and all sorts of other wonderful things that Disney is legendary for but that are wholly lacking in this dreary exercise in brand extension.
Wish whiffs in every department. The character design is bland. The ditties will not have you leaving the theater with a spring in your step or a song in your heart. The animation is professional, which is the best that can be said about it.
This doesn’t feel like Disney; it feels like a much worse studio desperately ripping off the biggest name in animation .
Wish isn’t a movie; it’s synergy in cinematic form and not even particularly inspired synergy either.
One and a half Stars out of Five
So after the decades of High Disney Art, we’re back to the Son of Flubber era. Only this looks like they poured a lot of money — and only money — into it. I was loath to badtalk this because I didn’t want to sound like the online chuds crowing Go Woke Go Choke, but this is the most corporate, lifeless attempt at “art” I’ve ever seen.
Sounds like this Wish came from a cursed monkeys paw... Maybe some day we'll see the movie of how it originated! Happy holidays and thank you for seeing these movies so we don't have to and also making them entertaining through your reviews.