Wish (2023)

Taking the wish out of us

A couple of months ago, I visited Disney World in Orlando. While we were at Epcot, I noticed a sign that said: “Meet Asha – Right Now!” I looked up and there was just one person in line. My first thought was “who is Asha?” I had seen Wish when it first hit streaming, but I probably heard “get that through your system – solar!” referenced more often than the actual protagonist, so her name had slipped my brain. But my second thought was that it would be kind of fun to become an ardent Wish defender, someone who gets really excited to meet Asha, right now. It certainly seems to be a corner I could have to myself: I don’t think I’ve met a single person above the age of seven who actually likes Wish. There was a single family in line for a character meeting and photo op… in the middle of the day, during spring break season, on a main throughway of Disney World! We had to wait more than an hour for a tucked-in-the-corner meeting of the Frozen princesses first thing in the morning! I could probably get Wish merch on discount. Maybe I could make it my brand like the guy who makes a big deal about liking the “Shiny” song from Moana.

I just can’t do it. I have some contrarian instincts, but not that many. Wish is a story constructed on such a catastrophic piece of world-building that it poisons everything surrounding it, but most of those components didn’t need any extra poison: The music is unhummable with some of the most egregiously bad lyrics I’ve ever encountered in a film musical, let alone a momentous, flagship output from Walt Disney Animation Studios. The self-mythologizing of Disney as both a series of characters and images and as a shapeless, inspirational concept gives the entire film, particularly its second half and denouement, an insidious rot. So much doubt, so little benefit to give.

But let’s dig into that story world and premise a bit. A wizard named Magnifico (Chris Pine) founds a kingdom called Rosas on an island on the Mediterranean Sea. He promises a domain that will protect and fulfill your deepest wishes. What does this mean exactly? On your 18th birthday, you tell your biggest wish to Magnifico. The wish physically exits you, wiping your memory of the desire, and it becomes a bubble that floats around Magnifico’s tower. Every now and again, he uses his magic to grant one of those wishes.

This is so obviously stupid I feel it would be sufficient to point at it. Get a load of this idiot premise! In a film that begged more sympathy, I might convince myself to just say “metaphor” and wave jazz hands and let it slide. But Wish is so intent on explicating and literalizing itself, leaving no room for dream logic or ambiguity or elliptical reality, that it double-dog-dares you to apply critical thinking. So I guess I will. First of all, why would this scenario ever be considered good for the citizens? I guess their wishes are “protected,” whatever that means, when you let go of them. You can’t fail to achieve your dreams if you don’t know what they are. But you can’t pursue them either, or even know whether they were or weren’t achieved. The main allure is getting your deepest wish fulfilled, I suppose, but if you don’t know what your wish is at that point, why do you care? Also, the math makes no sense — more people are turning 18 and giving up their wishes than Magnifico appears to be granting them, so even basic reasoning should make clear that the odds are not in your favor.

More substantively, for all its world-building and pondering of a society where wishes are the basis of politics and economy, the movie has almost no meaningful introspection on what a “wish” actually is. One character’s wish is to “inspire the next generation.” Another wish we witness in a bubble is, apparently, that a woman would like to bake a delicious cake. These two desires have almost nothing in common. One is something you check off a list. The other might be more accurately described as a “value” and a lifelong pursuit than it is a bucket list task… more “make the world a better place” and less “visit the Grand Canyon.” Does the movie consider these the same category of life pursuit?

Also, wishes aren’t like pet cats. They don’t exist as entities separate from you that you can surrender to the pound, at which point they exit your life. Most desires in life — “wishes,” as the movie insists — develop organically from your values and personality traits. (Also, as Hunter points out, does nobody write these wishes down or tell their friends?) Consider, for a moment, me: two of my life’s wishes are 1) to see that my children grow up happy and healthy, and 2) to write movie reviews that people want to read. To remove those “wishes” from my head would either be entirely ineffective — I would immediately reacquire those desires based on the rest of what I care about in life. If I love my kids, of course I want them to thrive. If I like creating and I like movies, of course I want to review them. Alternately, if I must forget them, wish extraction could be the equivalent of a lobotomy, an eradication of the fundamental beliefs that make me, me. (I stop loving my children? Movies are boring now?) Wish does seem to get around to the latter idea towards the end of the movie, but more in a therapy talk sort of way than intrinsic horror at the very proposition: “Our dreams give us something to strive for”-ass aphorisms.

Wish’s heroine is Asha (Ariana DeBose), a 17-year-old idealist who lives in Rosas and wants her 100-year-old grandfather Sabino’s (Victor Garber) wish to be granted. (This raises more questions: How old is Rosas? How old is Magnifico? Is he old enough that Sabino gave up his wish at age 18, 82 years ago? Or did he move to Rosas as an adult? Do adult immigrants immediately surrender their wishes? Is this required to attain citizenship? I need to stop…) Asha interviews for the position of Magnifico’s assistant. When she realizes Magnifico is hoarding the wishes as an opiate of the masses and a power trip, Asha becomes disillusioned. So she decides to do something totally radical from the rest of the world around her: She makes a wish. WOW. Except, this time she wishes up to the stars in the sky rather than to Magnfico. This triggers the arrival of an anthropomorphized star named… uh, Star, a bouncy orb with the design of a Funko Pop.

Now with her celestial sidekick, a true “wish upon a star” by her side, Asha comes to a deeper understanding of the nature of wishes (or something) and she begins conspiring to overthrow Magnifico’s reign of wish oppression (or something). Her co-conspirators include seven friends who resemble the dwarfs from Snow White both in wardrobe and personality traits and Queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral), Magnifico’s wife, who has grown tired of his increasing paranoia and his irksome dabbling in forbidden magics that turn you evil. Their skepticism of a smug, crypto-fascist leader eventually turns into a proper resistance. (Hmmm…)

There’s some extra baloney on the edges. Asha’s pet goat Valentino (Alan Tudyk) gets a deep silky voice from Star’s magic, and a bunch of plants and animals gain personality traits in an obvious homage to Bambi and Flowers and Trees, the first color animated short. Amid all this, we get some betrayal, some redemption, some disguise twists, and an action climax that briefly threatens to become exciting before a self-congratulatory conclusion.

And now for the worst of it all, except, I suppose, the ridiculous premise itself: the music. Oh Lordy. It really makes me want to take back anything jaded I might have ever said or written about the over-exposed Lin-Manuel Miranda or Pasek and Paul. Songwriters Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice have designed melodies with the maximum amount of neural grease such that they never risk sticking in your long-term memory or, frankly, even your short-term memory. I can’t imagine humming a single one of these numbers, with the possible exception of the signature song, “This Wish,” a blatant attempt at “Let It Go” or “How Far I’ll Go” crossover mantra-driven earworm energy.

If the melodies themselves are thoroughly bland, the lyrics by Michaels are an outright travesty. I can forgive a clunker or two (let’s not forget “every moment red letter” from “A Whole New World”) but some of these lyrics are for the record books. The worst offender is “I’m a Star,” which features the aforementioned talking animals. I mean… check out this stanza:

Did we just blow your mind? Uh-huh
Well, I’ve known the entire time
When it comes to the universe, we’re all shareholders
Get that through your system (Solar!)

Those are gleefully obnoxious lyrics. Maybe more frustrating is the more earnest clumsiness of “This Wish.” Take its chorus:

So I make this wish
To have something more for us than this

That’s just an awkward, flavorless word salad. Why say something in three direct words when you could say it in thirteen clumsy ones? It’s not often I watch a major studio production and see or hear something that makes me think “me or most of my friends could do better than that,” but Wish’s lyrics really do the trick.

Alright, most of this review has been quite cynical, so let’s pivot to some tempered enthusiasm: The visuals are neat! Wish is really trying something with its animation. It has an actual, distinctive aesthetic with a thoughtful color scheme, and these visual choices and ornamentation tell us real things about the story world and its characters. How many computer-animated films in cinema history can you say that about? A half dozen at most? The animation has a delicately simulated abstraction, evoking brushstrokes and smudges like the oil-paint backgrounds of a Golden Age Disney film, but achieved through careful CGI modeling and texturing rather than physical art supplies. The upshot of this is that the movie really looks like a beautiful painting come to life. Many of the compositions have a flat mise-en-scène to emulate multi-plane animation or make clever use of perspective size distortion. It is, at its best moments, both daring and attractive as an animation style. Sadly, given Wish’s epic commercial and critical flopping, it’s likely to be a Disney anomaly in favor of even more Frozen-esque photorealistic animation with a heavy emphasis on the newest and shiniest particle effects from the fanciest rendering farms, as opposed to more stylish and bold artistic choices like Wish.

I don’t want to get too carried away about the animation. It has some serious problems. The textures don’t always flow smoothly together, making it look a bit like a cel-shaded PlayStation 3 game at times. I don’t know if the character animation in Disney’s movies has always been this jerky, but there are a few moments of definite clunkiness. The character designs are still using the same approximate models Disney has trafficked in since Tangled. Asha has a lovely design, but something about Magnifico made my skin crawl — and not in a fun villain way. A design more gaunt and sharp would have had a more profound impact as he descended into lunacy. (There’s also the matter that, for as effectively stylized as this is, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish did a LOT of this, and more, better. It’s not a one-for-one substitution, though; Wish leans harder into faux-2D and has a more rigid color schema.)

The film does come together for little flickers at a time, but never longer than flickers, and always chased by one noxious flavor of bile or another. For example, the climax of Magnifico becoming a Phenomenal Cosmic Power, his evil green coloring exploding outward, is truly awesome and well-designed. And then it’s undercut by the most cornball “We’re All in This Together” resolution. No sustained glory in Wish. It can’t be done. But at 95 lightning-quick minutes, it’s at least well-paced and gets out of its own damn way — there’s never too much that’s good in a row, but there’s frankly never too much that’s bad in a row, either, because it all keeps moving.

What ultimately makes Wish so frustrating is that the movie has pre-anointed itself as the new vanguard of Disney animation greatness, the proper payoff on a century of Disney glory. If Wish had scrubbed off its self-importance and brand worship, it might have been tolerable; a flawed but worthy creative risk. Heck, the “When You Wish Upon a Star” post-credits stinger by itself might have been a perfect, chills-inducing grace note and homage. Instead, Wish willingly puts on its back the expectations and legacy of the greatest animation studio in the history of American feature-length cinema, and it completely crumbles under that weight. So I make this wish, to have something more for us than this.

• Review Series: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Is It Good?

Not Very Good (3/8)

---

Awards, Honors, & Rankings

• The B.A.D.S. (2023) - Best Voice Actor (Ariana DeBose) (Nominee)

---

Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.