So Disney is celebrating 100 years this year. What’s funny is that it might be in the most tumultuous years in its history, between the writers’ and actors’ strikes happening simultaneously and the CEO becoming a villain in that narrative. Also, the movies haven’t been hitting in the box office like they used to, with more of that centered around Marvel not dominating. Earlier this year, a Pixar animated film disappointed on release but slowly built its way back up to a decent gross. During all that, it seemed all of Disney’s hopes on ending the year with The Marvels and Wish, and with The Marvels faltering, how does Wish fare? Well, it’s about a 17-year-old girl named Asha who lives in the wonderful Kingdom of Rosas. Rosas was founded and ruled by King Magnifico and his wife, Queen Amaya. Magnifico studied magic and sorcery and learned the ability to grant wishes. In his kingdom, when every person turns 18, they give their greatest wish to the King and keep it in his observatory. The person no longer remembers that wish to make sure they don’t feel the loss. Then, once a year, he grants the wish of one of his subjects. Asha dreams of becoming his assistant, and during her interview, she learns that the King only grants the wishes of those he feels are safe and acceptable to him to grant. The rest he keeps forever. After learning this and questioning him, she is not going to be the assistant, and her family is punished because of her questions. She later wishes upon a star to make things better, and when a literal star comes out of the sky to her, the kingdom is changed forever.
So, what worked best for me was the film’s artistic styling. They chose to make the film look like an illustrated storybook. All the characters in the world have a texture of watercolor paper throughout, along with an excellent use of the outline of the characters to match the style of a flatter image being brought into the third dimension. It’s different from what you’d see in Spider-Verse films, which is trying to match the different comic artists’ works on the page with his bold black lines and hatching. This has a more fluid gouache-like line of even weight around the characters. The colors are bright, and the environments are clear and easy to read. The character animations are wonderful and, fluid and expressive. This film purposefully captures the classic Disney look from its early past and 90s rebirth looks. It does a great job of storytelling through palette and design. Ariana DeBose, who voices Asha, does a fantastic job here with her performance and singing. The songs did stick with me and really filled up the theater. Chris Pine as King Magnifico really surprised me because I didn’t think he could sing like he does in this film, but he does great with his songs and with singing with DeBose. His vocal performance overall is good as he needs to do a lot with carrying the change in his character through that more than what we see in the film. The rest of the cast also does very well, but with so much of the film about these two characters, a lot more of the film rests on their performances than the rest.
Now we get to what didn’t work for me. See Wish ends up being a film that tries to celebrate the centennial of Disney by being some type of meta origin point of many Disney animated classics. Now, bringing all these things together isn’t new per se because of Kingdom Hearts, but that’s a game series and not a movie. The film gets hampered down by putting cameos throughout the whole story that for me, takes me right out of it. Do I need to see how Bambi and Thumper get the ability to talk? No, I don’t. Do I need the origin of the Evil Queen’s Mirror or the fairy godmother? Not really. All Asha’s friends are literally the Seven Dwarves or the inspirations to say. This constant need to tie back to older movies while trying to tell a good story and move it along hurts it in the end. It left me feeling lacking at the conclusion. I think there is something of a solid idea and a good story in this, but for me, this is the disappointment that others felt with Strange World last year. Wish’s overreliance on Disney’s actual past holds back what could’ve been another real Disney classic animated fairy tale from greatness.
Score: C
