Wish Is a Failure in Storytelling and a Waste of Potential

The marketing for Disney's Wish touted it as "100 Years in the Making," an animated feature to capstone a century's worth of stories from the world's biggest storytelling company. Even without the lofty ambitions, its Disney pedigree alone should guarantee entertainment value, but Wish is something else entirely: it's the soulless antithesis of everything that made Disney animation great. 

For a film that celebrates Disney's animated heritage, Wish is a bland exercise in CGI that's an absolute embarrassment to the house of mouse's history. At a time when audiences are treated to spectacular, groundbreaking animation with features like Sony's Spider-Verse or Riot Games' Arcane by the French studio Fortiche, Wish is unimaginative, flat, and even shamelessly reuses models from past Disney films like Pixar's Ratatouille. The perennially sneezing Safi (I had to Google his name because Wish's entire cast of side characters are absolutely forgettable) is almost identical to Linguini, and two other characters look like fatter and thinner versions of Frozen's Kristoff. It's distracting and irritating in its laziness.

The fluidity, vibrancy, and life of Disney cartoons used to be the gold standard of animated storytelling. There is more character in the softness and movement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film made in 1937, than there is in Wish and all the technology that went into making it. Disney stopped using traditional animation in 1990 in favor of computer animation, but Wish might be the most lifeless and uninspired cinema Disney has ever produced.

The story is set in the kingdom of Rosas, which is ruled by a sorcerer named Magnifico (Chris Pine), who has the power to take a person's wish and also grant it. The names Rosas and Magnifico are so dull they seem like they were generated by ChatGPT. In fact, the entire story feels like it was spat out by AI, where a magician whose origins are never explained suddenly sets up a city that people flock to and inexplicably hand over their wishes and dreams — which results in them forgetting about them — in the lottery style hope of having their wish granted. Who on earth thought this was ever a good idea?

The main character, Asha (Ariana DeBose), has a centenarian grandfather whose wish had never been granted, and the first thing she does during her job interview to become Magnifico's apprentice (the Sorcerer's Apprentice, get it?) is ask him to grant it. It's cringey, entitled, and off-putting because there's an entire kingdom of people hoping to get their wish granted and Asha wants to bypass the entire process. But it gets even worse from that point because Magnifico, who gets turned off with Asha's entitlement, reveals his entire plan to a relative stranger. He tells Asha that 'wishes are dangerous' and that he never intended to grant everyone's wishes, just those that he considered harmless enough. He just straight up tells her his entire villainous plot! There's no moment of discovery, no subterfuge, no pretense…Magnifico just reveals himself as the bad guy to Asha and the audiences and he simply sends her away.

Magnifico also has nebulous motivations for withholding wishes, hand waved in a backstory that raises more questions than it answers. Magnifico and his wife encountered some terrible people in the past, so he decides to become an all-powerful sorcerer and start his own kingdom. It's absolutely bizarre. The fact that this villain has a loving wife would've been a novel idea in a world full of dirty old Jafars and envious Evil Queens, but it's hardly a plot point because their relationship doesn't drive or define either of them. In fact, spoiler alert, when Magnifico does his villain thing towards the end, his wife Amaya (Angelique Cabral) drops him like a hot potato with no remorse or sadness or feeling of betrayal. She does a complete 180 and kicks him to the curb despite exhibiting love and devotion in the first half of the film. It's horrifying.

After failing her job interview, Asha goes off into the woods and wishes upon a star, something she used to do with her late father. The fact that her father is dead has absolutely nothing to do with the story, it's not even a plot device because the father is never alluded to except to make Asha's practice of sitting on a tree to look at stars more meaningful or sentimental. He's dead for no reason. So many things in Wish are the way they are for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Her forgettable assemblage of supporting characters, who are more like co-workers than friends, do absolutely nothing. They're simply there to take up space.

Even Valentino (Alan Tudyk), Asha's trusty goat companion, is there for comic relief but you can remove him entirely from the story and all you'd lose is a lame joke about his butt. Take, for example, Frozen's Olaf, who is both comic relief sidekick and a homage to Anna and Elsa's childhood. Speaking of homages and jokes, all Wish could do to pay homage to a century of Disney's fabled storytelling were a few jokes about Mary Poppins and Peter Pan.

Perhaps the most egregious fault of Wish is how much potential it wastes. Disney has such a rich and beautiful history, but Wish does practically nothing with it. It takes the song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," the music that opens every Disney feature, and extrapolates on its origin. At some point it plays on the idea that we are all made of stardust but never commits to it. Wish is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that never really comes together, often telling more than showing, with no subtlety, no plot twists, no grand reveals. Just a disappointing linear story so lacking in depth and inspiration it's heartbreaking. 

What's most alarming is that Wish is written by Jennifer Lee, Disney's Chief Creative Officer. Lee was behind Frozen, a brilliant story that subverted expectations about love and princesses. So it's surprising that the same creative force is behind this bland and criminally predictable feature. It doesn't bode well for the future of Disney if the very steward of its creative future allowed something as underwhelming as Wish to be released. Did I mention it's also a musical? I didn't, because the songs are just as uninspired and forgettable as the story. From the highs of Moana, Frozen, and even Encanto, Disney has sunk to its musical lowest with Wish. If you want an animated feature that's fun for the whole family, with catchy musical numbers, funny moments, and lovable characters, watch Trolls Band Together instead.