This year marks Disney’s 100th anniversary as an animation studio, and they’ve decided to celebrate the occasion by taking several of their classic characters and throw them all together into the same film for one magical story. That, at least, is what Wish is supposed to be—if you squint hard enough. The film plays incredibly coy with its portrayal of its classical Disney archetypes and tropes, choosing to take recognizable characters and their trademark traits and transpose them onto ancillary characters with only seconds of screen time.
What Zack Snyder did to DC Comics is what Wish does to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and that’s extremely odd for a studio so surgically effective at fracking its own nostalgia to new audiences. That wouldn’t be such a knock against Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn’s film had it turned out to have a life and vibrancy all its own. Wish, though, plays out like the No Frills version of a Disney princess story, containing all the correct ingredients, but no one element is allowed to reach for the cheap seats. It’s uninspiring right from the opening seconds.
The film’s art style is a half-hearted attempt to marry 2D Disney art with the studio’s modern CG style. That marriage can work—2023’s rescued Disney runaway Nimona does it quite beautifully—but Wish’s approach to its color palette and production design is painfully muted. For a studio that revels in the splendor of its magical worlds, even in their weakest efforts, to look upon a Disney kingdom and feel absolutely nothing is utterly baffling.
It’s not for a lack of cultural inspirations to pull from either. Wish’s whole plot hinges around the Mediterranean kingdom of Rosas, founded by a famous sorcerer with a tragic backstory named Magnifico (Chris Pine) who has the ability to grant the wishes of his people. Rosas’s whole deal is that it’s a haven for anyone from anywhere to come and build a life while Magnifico safeguards their wishes in blue crystals at his castle until they can be granted, and the country thrives due to everyone bringing their culture and experiences with them.
The narration tells us as much, but aside from the diverse ethnic coding of its cast, the film mostly makes Rosas feel like a gray stone place where culture goes to die. It can’t even display a verdant, Mediterranean green with any consistency. The spells cast by our villain later in the film are greener than anything in Rosas’s vast pastoral landscape. It’s a real problem when the baddie of your film has the most eye-catching style and color palette.
That’s especially egregious here considering the plot. Our heroine, a village girl named Asha (Ariana DeBose), interviews to become Magnifico’s apprentice. She discovers that the sorcerer can basically grant any wish that he wants at any time, but refuses if the wish could pose a threat to his reign. When a very much not-hired Asha makes a literal wish upon a star for the people of Rosas to have a better life and an actual, adorable star flies down to answer, Magnifico, in fear of what this means for his rule, starts putting the squeeze on his people and their wishes.
Wish has an allegorical undercurrent about powerful men holding the dreams of the lower classes hostage with vague promises of future prosperity and how it dehumanizes them. But all that plays second fiddle to talking animals, butt jokes, and maybe the least inspiring collection of trademark Disney songs since the dark days of Brother Bear and Home on the Range. That will be enough for parents to placate children for the foreseeable further once the film hits Disney+, and granted, Disney of all companies probably doesn’t want to get too deep in the weeds on exploring class inequality, but it’s not like the film offers much to invest in otherwise.
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