[4.6/10] Wish almost feels like a parody of a Disney movie. It has the vague aura of Shrek’s satirical take on the House of Mouse oeuvre, except somehow played straight. It plays like one of those direct-to-video Disney knockoffs that sneaks just close enough to the line to confuse a well-intentioned gift-giving grandparent while avoiding getting sued. It seems like someone threw every film released by the Walt Disney Animation Studios into an A.I. blender, and this is what it spit out.
What it doesn’t feel like is the worthy capstone to one-hundred years of magic-making from one of Hollywood’s most storied production houses. More so than most Disney flicks, Wish throws in ample tributes to its cinematic brethren to commemorate the occasion. A talking goat dreams of Zootopia. The villain squashes reveries of Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, and Cinderella. The protagonist's friend group is Disney-bounding the cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for some reason. All of these shoutouts are pleasing enough, but at best they’re sprinkles thrown on top of a not-very-appetizing cake.
On a more substantive level, Wish follows a durable Disney format. There’s a princess type -- a young girl in a vaguely medieval kingdom with pluck and a dream -- even if she never becomes royalty. There’s a conniving villain who acts to hold her down and occasionally summon some evil magic. And there’s the usual cadre of buddies, cute animal sidekicks, and helpful woodland creatures. If you fell asleep and half-remembered every Disney princess movie you’d ever seen, you might get the basic outline of Wish.
Not for nothing, it’s also a musical, which is a good thing!...in principle. In practice, the songs veer between forgettable and outright bad. The titular tune “The Wish” has a few stirring stanzas, and the “let’s go get ‘em” ensemble number before the climax, “Knowing What I Know Now” has a solid rhythm and some nice interplay. But by and large, the tunes in Wish are well below Disney’s standards. The melodies aren’t catchy; the phrasing is rushed and jumbled, and many lines feature some downright miserable attempts at rhyming. (The allegory/excitatory/morning/story/poorly section is downright painful.) For a studio that's employed Lin Manuel Miranda, too many of the songs in Wish play like cheap imitations of his motor-mouthed lyrical style.
The animation is no better. Again, there’s a few nice pieces here and there. The imagery of Asha and her family rowing to the islet offers a striking starscape. The aforementioned “Knowing What I Know Now” number features a winning shadow puppet motif that stands out. Star, the anthropomorphic wishing star who helps Asha, is downright adorable throughout. And of all things, the villain’s hair is weirdly convincing. But these gems are few and far between.
The animation and overall look of the film seems strangely chintzy, as though this was originally meant for television and got gussied up at the last minute. The character designs are meh at best. Everyone looks like a generic plastic doll. Their faces and expressions don’t seem to match their bodies. And there’s an exaggerated, hyperactiveness to everyone’s movements that leads directly into the uncanny valley. If this is a tribute to a studio whose technological achievements and visual splendor was once its calling card, why does the movie look so blah?
The plotting is no better. At the heart of Wish lies an intriguing premise. A seemingly benevolent sorcerer king who gathers and “protects” the wishes of his populace, while only scarcely and self-servingly deciding to grant a fraction of them, has some thematic punch to it. The fact that the citizens of his supposedly idyllic realm lose their memories of their deepest dream when handing over their wish bubbles to the king, and that he later builds up his power by absorbing them is, true to the quasi-Disney mashup spirit of the piece, some real Kingdom Hearts-style weirdness. But you can at least sense the film trying to make some creditable statement in all of this.
Unfortunately, the story and the character motivations are some combination of jumbled and vague. At base, our hero, Asha, wants to better the lives of her fellow citizens, and the villain, Magnifico, wants to hold onto power. But Asha is as off-the-shell a spunky-but-heartfelt protagonist as they come, and despite a solid performance by Ariana DeBose, there’s nothing much to distinguish her. The reliably game Chris Pine manages to inject some life into Magnifico, and his “Why don’t I get thanked for doing the bare minimum for my people in a self-serving way?” mentality has some juice to it. But there’s just not enough depth to this character, or clarity in how he aims to accomplish anything, to compel you.
The rules for how the wish stuff works seem random. They can float around aimlessly without issue, but extracting them makes you mostly forget. They can be destroyed which gives you a feeling of grief. But it’s okay because some other magic can bring them back! But watch out for dark magic, which you can use to grow more powerful using other people’s wishes as fuel! Don’t worry though, because if you beat the dude infused with dark magic, all the wishes just come back out, good as new.
Look, it’s churlish to complain about the mechanics of a magical ecosystem in an all ages film. But the point is that without some defined boundaries, there’s very little in the way of stakes here. Magic is all well and good, but when it alternatively makes chickens dance and instills in a woman the pain of losing her spouse, without much to distinguish why one happens versus the other, the pixie dust feels like a narrative and comedic cheat code rather than a sturdy element of your story. Even there, the comedy pales in comparison to studio good luck charm Alan Tudyk using his Clayface voice to (I’d bet) improvise funny one-liners to spice up an otherwise dull and tin-eared spate of dialogue.
The sense of cause and effect is also lacking in the plot, but at base, we get a decent enough, “Not even you, evil wish-sucking King, can stop the power of us all wishing together!” And again, you can see what the creative team is going for. Somewhere in the narrative junk pile, the commendable idea of everyone holding onto their wish and working to make it come true, rather than giving it away and waiting on some questionable authority to simply make it happen, comes through. But when the characters used to illustrate that idea, and the story used to explicate it, are as janky and unmemorable as this one, the message loses a most of its oomph.
The vague hint at the end of the film is that Rosas, the utopian island setting for this story, is the source from which all Disney movies come, inspired by the wishes and dreams of a utopian, multicultural population -- right down to the protagonist’s allegorically 100-year-old grandfather coming up with “When You Wish Upon a Star”.
All I can say is that this is somehow the least plausible part of the movie. Not because of the mechanics of the suggestion, which are no worse than other metaphors for the creative process. But because it’s impossible to believe that a century’s worth of wondrous, ground-breaking, heart-rending films emerged from such a pallid, generic, emotionally inert, and all around uninteresting source.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-05-13T15:32:34Z
[4.6/10] Wish almost feels like a parody of a Disney movie. It has the vague aura of Shrek’s satirical take on the House of Mouse oeuvre, except somehow played straight. It plays like one of those direct-to-video Disney knockoffs that sneaks just close enough to the line to confuse a well-intentioned gift-giving grandparent while avoiding getting sued. It seems like someone threw every film released by the Walt Disney Animation Studios into an A.I. blender, and this is what it spit out.
What it doesn’t feel like is the worthy capstone to one-hundred years of magic-making from one of Hollywood’s most storied production houses. More so than most Disney flicks, Wish throws in ample tributes to its cinematic brethren to commemorate the occasion. A talking goat dreams of Zootopia. The villain squashes reveries of Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, and Cinderella. The protagonist's friend group is Disney-bounding the cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves for some reason. All of these shoutouts are pleasing enough, but at best they’re sprinkles thrown on top of a not-very-appetizing cake.
On a more substantive level, Wish follows a durable Disney format. There’s a princess type -- a young girl in a vaguely medieval kingdom with pluck and a dream -- even if she never becomes royalty. There’s a conniving villain who acts to hold her down and occasionally summon some evil magic. And there’s the usual cadre of buddies, cute animal sidekicks, and helpful woodland creatures. If you fell asleep and half-remembered every Disney princess movie you’d ever seen, you might get the basic outline of Wish.
Not for nothing, it’s also a musical, which is a good thing!...in principle. In practice, the songs veer between forgettable and outright bad. The titular tune “The Wish” has a few stirring stanzas, and the “let’s go get ‘em” ensemble number before the climax, “Knowing What I Know Now” has a solid rhythm and some nice interplay. But by and large, the tunes in Wish are well below Disney’s standards. The melodies aren’t catchy; the phrasing is rushed and jumbled, and many lines feature some downright miserable attempts at rhyming. (The allegory/excitatory/morning/story/poorly section is downright painful.) For a studio that's employed Lin Manuel Miranda, too many of the songs in Wish play like cheap imitations of his motor-mouthed lyrical style.
The animation is no better. Again, there’s a few nice pieces here and there. The imagery of Asha and her family rowing to the islet offers a striking starscape. The aforementioned “Knowing What I Know Now” number features a winning shadow puppet motif that stands out. Star, the anthropomorphic wishing star who helps Asha, is downright adorable throughout. And of all things, the villain’s hair is weirdly convincing. But these gems are few and far between.
The animation and overall look of the film seems strangely chintzy, as though this was originally meant for television and got gussied up at the last minute. The character designs are meh at best. Everyone looks like a generic plastic doll. Their faces and expressions don’t seem to match their bodies. And there’s an exaggerated, hyperactiveness to everyone’s movements that leads directly into the uncanny valley. If this is a tribute to a studio whose technological achievements and visual splendor was once its calling card, why does the movie look so blah?
The plotting is no better. At the heart of Wish lies an intriguing premise. A seemingly benevolent sorcerer king who gathers and “protects” the wishes of his populace, while only scarcely and self-servingly deciding to grant a fraction of them, has some thematic punch to it. The fact that the citizens of his supposedly idyllic realm lose their memories of their deepest dream when handing over their wish bubbles to the king, and that he later builds up his power by absorbing them is, true to the quasi-Disney mashup spirit of the piece, some real Kingdom Hearts-style weirdness. But you can at least sense the film trying to make some creditable statement in all of this.
Unfortunately, the story and the character motivations are some combination of jumbled and vague. At base, our hero, Asha, wants to better the lives of her fellow citizens, and the villain, Magnifico, wants to hold onto power. But Asha is as off-the-shell a spunky-but-heartfelt protagonist as they come, and despite a solid performance by Ariana DeBose, there’s nothing much to distinguish her. The reliably game Chris Pine manages to inject some life into Magnifico, and his “Why don’t I get thanked for doing the bare minimum for my people in a self-serving way?” mentality has some juice to it. But there’s just not enough depth to this character, or clarity in how he aims to accomplish anything, to compel you.
The rules for how the wish stuff works seem random. They can float around aimlessly without issue, but extracting them makes you mostly forget. They can be destroyed which gives you a feeling of grief. But it’s okay because some other magic can bring them back! But watch out for dark magic, which you can use to grow more powerful using other people’s wishes as fuel! Don’t worry though, because if you beat the dude infused with dark magic, all the wishes just come back out, good as new.
Look, it’s churlish to complain about the mechanics of a magical ecosystem in an all ages film. But the point is that without some defined boundaries, there’s very little in the way of stakes here. Magic is all well and good, but when it alternatively makes chickens dance and instills in a woman the pain of losing her spouse, without much to distinguish why one happens versus the other, the pixie dust feels like a narrative and comedic cheat code rather than a sturdy element of your story. Even there, the comedy pales in comparison to studio good luck charm Alan Tudyk using his Clayface voice to (I’d bet) improvise funny one-liners to spice up an otherwise dull and tin-eared spate of dialogue.
The sense of cause and effect is also lacking in the plot, but at base, we get a decent enough, “Not even you, evil wish-sucking King, can stop the power of us all wishing together!” And again, you can see what the creative team is going for. Somewhere in the narrative junk pile, the commendable idea of everyone holding onto their wish and working to make it come true, rather than giving it away and waiting on some questionable authority to simply make it happen, comes through. But when the characters used to illustrate that idea, and the story used to explicate it, are as janky and unmemorable as this one, the message loses a most of its oomph.
The vague hint at the end of the film is that Rosas, the utopian island setting for this story, is the source from which all Disney movies come, inspired by the wishes and dreams of a utopian, multicultural population -- right down to the protagonist’s allegorically 100-year-old grandfather coming up with “When You Wish Upon a Star”.
All I can say is that this is somehow the least plausible part of the movie. Not because of the mechanics of the suggestion, which are no worse than other metaphors for the creative process. But because it’s impossible to believe that a century’s worth of wondrous, ground-breaking, heart-rending films emerged from such a pallid, generic, emotionally inert, and all around uninteresting source.