Movie Review: ‘Wish’

Director: Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn

Cast: Ariana DeBose, Chris Pine, Alan Tudyk, Angelique Cabral, Victor Garber, Harvey Guillén, Evan Peters

Plot: In the kingdom of Rosas, King Magnifico protects his people with his magical powers. He also takes their greatest wish into his care, routinely granting them to people. Asha is a young girl who becomes disillusioned with this system, and meets a sentient wishing star that gives her the chance to return everyone’s wishes to them.

Review: Look, I know that the plot summary is confusing but I’m really struggling to find a way to express the plot in a simple way. This might be the first sticking point with this movie. The story feels like it hasn’t ironed out its plot yet, or possibly overthought it to the point of mangling it. The pitch was straight-forward: let’s find out what the story is with the star that people ‘wish upon’. At some point during production this idea got lost, because we never find out about the star. If anything, we have more questions about how this is supposed to work.

Let’s try again. Our main character is Asha (DeBose) and she lives in the kingdom of Rosas, a magnificent kingdom where everyone is happy and festivals are common. People flock to Rosas to start a happier life. Asha works as a tour guide, but her real desire is to win the coveted of position of apprentice to the kind Magnifico (Pine). One thing that makes the magical King Magnifico such a beloved ruler is his ability to grant people’s wishes. The arrangement is that when you turn 18, Magnifico takes your wish in the form of a bubble and keeps them all safe in his tower. Then, about once a month, there will be a wish ceremony and a persons wish is granted with some waiting mere weeks and some waiting for years. Whilst waiting, the people of Rosas cannot remember what their wish was…they just have to wait for their turn to come up.

As Asha is going for her job it’s her grandfather’s (Gabor) 100th birthday, and she uses this opportunity to ask that his wish be granted. This is when she learns that Magnifico is never going to grant this wish because it’s vague enough (create something that will inspire new generations) that it could result in something bad happening. Asha is horrified to learn that some people’s wishes will never be granted, and won’t be returned, and her grandfather will always go unfulfilled. This is seen to be a great horror, and Asha sets out to steal the wish back. She makes a wish upon a star for help, and the star comes out of the sky as an anthropomorphic ball of light that spreads magic through the land, giving speech to plants and animals alike including Asha’s goat Valentino (Tudyk). The star, known as Star, wants to free all the wishes so Asha and Star, along with Asha’s seven teenager friends of single personality traits and the Queen work oust King Magnifico and return everyone’s wishes. King Magnifico reads from an evil magic book to fight back, and creates a powerful staff that begins to corrupt him. Asha, Star, Valentino, Queen Amaya, Dahlia, Gabo, Hal, Simon, Safi, Dario and Bazeema plan a heist to get into the castle’s tower and steal the wishes.

This story is all over the place. Why people giving up their wishes becomes such a driving motivation for Asha is fuzzy. She finds out that Magnifico needs to be selective with the wishes he grants and reacts like she’s found a hidden torture chamber that the king uses to blow off steam by mutilating children. There seems be an attempt to make the villain a more complex, but it still reads like he’s doing the right thing and its only through magical plot contrivances that he becomes irrationally evil and starts brainwashing people. Asha’s motivation is bratty, reacting to her family not winning the magical lottery by wanting to destroy anyone else’s chance to win either. It’s all built on this notion that a person’s life is meaningless if they can’t daydream about being able to fly.

Disney, as a media company, markets itself on the abstract concept and bringing dreams to life. Attempting to turn this into a narrative conflict is confusing and messy. There’s way to many characters, and we’re not given much to care about any of them. Motivations are all over the place and rarely well expressed. Simon (Peters) is sleepy all the time because his wish was taken away, although this doesn’t happen to anyone else, and they lament that when his wish is granted he’ll be back to his old self, whatever that was, se he’s just a sleepy person who doesn’t move the story forward at all. The one character we liked – Valentino the goat, mostly because we love Alan Tudyk – should be a consistent comic relief but he’s lost in the crowd for much of the film.

If you look at the general responses to this film, you’d see that the most common complaint about Wish is the animation. This is a justified complaint, because it looks inexcusably bad for a major Disney film. Even their unsuccessful movies generally look well animated, such as Strange World. Blending together the watercolour and CGI styles used at different points in the animation studios history is a good idea, but the execution is awful, with characters looking like their frame rate is lagging, lacking any charm and set against dull, bland grey backgrounds.

For a magical kingdom, Rosas is certainly a dreary place. It’s all flat, grey and boring. Even a magical library filled with whimsical spell book is mostly coloured with beige. There may be a symbolic element here, with the people of Rosas seeing it as a wondrous place when it’s really something sinister, but it doesn’t gel. It certainly isn’t interesting to look like. I guess the parks could save time budget by opening up a disused warehouse and telling guests they’re in the magical world of Rosas.

The story is all over the place, the animation and style are uninspired, but the biggest anchor pulling Wish down is the forced attempt to make this a “Significant” movie in the Disney canon that would somehow pull together all Disney animated films much like how Cabin in the Woods would link all horror movies together. The way other Disney films are incorporated into Wish, however, is hugely inconsistent leading to it feeling like a hurried addition and a weak attempt to tweak audience nostalgia. Some references are subtle, visual nods to past films, while at the same time entire characters will turn up for no clear reason.

We’ve got the seven characters known as ‘The Teens’. It’s not made obvious, but you may notice that each one is inspired by one of the Seven Dwarves. The leader wears red and has little glasses, one is goofy and wears a green cap, one of the girls is happy about everything…that kind of thing. When all the animals start talking, we get a rabbit who thumps his foot on the ground when excited, a nod to Bambi, and a squirrel resembling one from The Sword in the Stone. That’s fine, we thought we’d have a bit more fun looking for these Easter Eggs. But then a deer thanks a bear for not eating them, and the bear responds “no problem, Bambi”. So this isn’t a subtle nod, this is sticking a reference to a past film in our faces and expecting us to thank them for the nostalgia.

The cringe continues as King Magnifico starts destroying wish bubbles with such on the nose dialogue as “you want to fly to a magical land? More like a NEVER LAND!” and “you want a perfect nanny for your children? I’m POPPIN’ that one!” Yes, very good, we get it. You’re referencing old movies. Well done. Unfortunately, the entire ending of the movie hinges on this gimmick. You see, the magical Star gives Asha a stick that can do magic. She can’t get the hang of it and the stick breaks within a scene of being introduced. When we get to the final confrontation, wherein the character’s wish power (or something) traps Magnifico in his staff which is now a mirror (Get it? He’s the Magic Mirror from Snow White), Star turns the broken stick into a magic wand and gives Asha magic powers in the same way Cinderella gets her magic ball gown (except nothing changes). The character based on Dopey suddenly chimes in with ‘now you can be our fairy Godmother!’ What does that mean? This big finale for the movie has no bearing on this story, and means literally nothing if you haven’t seen Cinderella.

This isn’t really a big deal, you can assume that most people are at least familiar with the classic animated movie, especially if you’re watching Disney movies. On the other hand, these movies are made for young children so they can be sold dolls and plushes (now gathering dust in a store near you). This will be the first Disney Princess film for a large chunk of the audience, the story is confusing enough even if you can pick out the references. So King Magnifico gets turned into the Magic Mirror and Asha gets turned into the Fairy Godmother (or something), and in addition to this, all the people’s wishes will then lead to ALL the Disney animated movies. Valentino talks about a future where anthropomorphic animals live in a vast metropolis, so at some point the humans will all die and be replaced by Zootopia (honestly fine with this) and then a woman who wants to fly gets introduced to…Peter Pan. Why is Peter Pan in this now? And is it Peter Pan? He looks like him and he’s introduced as Peter, but as someone who’s going to invent a ‘flying machine’ and that will grant a wish of flight to another person…or something…

It’s never made clear if this is a movie that has a flood of references to all previous Disney films, or if it’s some kind of multiverse hub that created the other worlds, or all these people’s wishes become the inspiration for stories, or whatever this is meant to be. It’s either a shallow attempt to cash in on nostalgia and fandoms, or it’s an overwrought, overthought, overwritten attempt to link everything together. This was done better in The Descendants, a made for TV tween musical about the children of Disney villains and Princesses going to school together, and that’s pretty embarrassing for the studio. They should have left this concept with Ralph Breaks The Internet, with all the Princesses hanging out and making in-jokes together, not building a major event movie around it.

When you get to the final credits, you get treated to characters from each Disney animated movie appearing as stars. They quickly chuck the least popular together in the middle (Chicken Little, Bolt, etc.) although Song of the South and others are notably absent. The strangest thing occurs if you actually sit until the very end and see Asha’s grandfather composing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ – the thing that will inspire future generations. That’s actually quite nice, but maybe put that in the mid-credits or just the end of the movie because the hyperactive audience of kids are not sitting through the credits to see this.

Oh, I almost forgot. This is a musical. It’s been less than 24 hours since I saw this movie and I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the songs. Take from that what you will.

Disney’s biggest mistake is tying Wish so heavily to the 100th year anniversary of the studio. As a celebration of their traditions, characters and stories is falls completely flat. It’s actually kinda sad that this is the big release they used to remind us of their legacy, because an entertainment and quality level it does not represent what Disney can do. If you’re looking for a little kick of Disney nostalgia to marks the occasion, rewatch Once Upon a Studio, a short film where all the Disney characters come out of their films to take a family photo. Short, sweet and to the point. Look, I’ll even embed it here so you don’t need to open Disney+.

Wasn’t that much nicer? It gets the point across much better than Wish. That movie just makes me grumpy. Dull, uninspired and ugly. Wish is the Disney you would get from Wish.com.

Rating: TWO out of TEN