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When You Wish Upon a Star™: The Movie


For a company that has come to conquer the American entertainment industry, it really feels like Disney didn’t notice that 2023 was their 100th anniversary. Sure, they put the number into their logo, but there seems to have been very little fanfare otherwise. No big event was held, no public efforts were made for a media celebration, there were no re-releases of some of their classic movies (which especially during the strikes would have been a really smart tactical move). It seems like the company just up and forgot, an immense missed opportunity, given so few media entities -especially ones this ubiquitous- can ever hope of achieving that longevity. Coming up to the end of the year, it looks like their only show of tribute is the movie Wish, a fairly pathetic one and the company seems to know it.
It says a lot that the Disney movie designed to celebrate the studio’s centennial had a significantly reduced marketing apparatus around it that did very little to emphasize the milestone, and is to be a likely box office failure as a result. It doesn’t take much to see that Disney had limited faith in it, selling the funny pandering animal sidekick much more than say the musical numbers or the plot. It’s the second Disney animated feature in a row that the company just seems to have given up on even before release. But this one carries with it much more significant symbolic gravity as the “100th Anniversary Feature”, which makes its failings from just about every angle more damning.
Wishing, if you didn’t know, is perhaps the  central component of the Disney brand. Ever since “When You Wish Upon a Star” in 1940 made it the company’s signature motif, it has been at the crux of the idea of Disney Magic -making wishes come true has essentially been Disney’s public slogan/mission statement for more than eighty years now. And Wish is a movie that ties directly into that strictly controlled and corporately maintained concept in ways both symbolic and bizarrely literal. It is set on a Mediterranean island where a sorcerer called Magnifico (voiced by Chris Pine) has built a kingdom around his ability to benevolently keep and occasionally grant people’s wishes. An idealistic girl Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose) aspires to be his apprentice only to learn an unpleasant secret about the king’s criterion for granting wishes. His magic and monopoly over wishes is then challenged when Asha accidentally wishes on a star that comes down to her in an anthropomorphic form, bringing a different kind of wish-granting magic to the island with it.
Aside from some convoluted mechanics to its world and the physical/spiritual properties of wishes (they’re all kept in little bubbles and apparently unknown to their owners), the movie slots simply and efficiently into an established track of Disney formula, except for Asha being anywhere near a princess on her island. Its characters are mostly one-note archetypes, its values fairly banal, and its animation aesthetics identical to every other Disney movie of the past decade and a half. It’s prettier animation for sure, owing in large part to the presence of various 2D techniques in the broad line-work and painterly effects on the backdrops that consciously evoke classic Disney movies like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Bambi; but the style itself in the character and creature designs remains as fixed and artistically unambitious as ever. Even while familiarity is part of the goal for a movie meant to celebrate Disney’s hundredth, it’s dull familiarity; in line with a pattern that has gotten more tedious the more it has repeated.
To some degree the creatives on this movie (written by Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore, directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn) are cognizant of this, if the obvious secret villain reveal being moved up to early in the plot is any sign. But they still aren’t willing to either take the significant risks or adopt the more classical models needed to break out. This is a film that moves along with no sense of danger to the protagonist or their ideals, no serious intonations as to its themes, and for as much as the world is explained, no authentic illusion of place. The last act seems to take up an inordinate amount of screen-time, and even the talking animal sidekick, Asha’s pet goat Valentino (voiced as always by Alan Tudyk) -pushed extremely heavily in what marketing this movie did get- is limited to barely more than those paltry jokes in the trailer.
But the thing is, had Valentino served a bigger role, had Asha been allowed a love interest, Magnifico allowed more freedom to be evil -all long-established hallmarks of Disney movies- the film would have been both a stronger individual piece and a greater Disney tribute. Wish suffers in the same way that other recent Disney movies have in going out of its way to avoid classic Disney tropes -though it should be noted, only very particular ones that the studio has mandated away. Yet this attitude has been so pervasive as to become cliché itself, and misses the point of why some of those tropes worked in the first place. The protagonist having a love interest can make them more relatable and allows the film opportunity for a tender moment or two to break up the plotting. Her being put in a vulnerable situation does not make her a “damsel” and can in fact exacerbate stakes. Allowing the villain to be just evil, without any subterfuge or sympathetic point of view, is actually a lot of fun.
Wish did at least bring back the villain song, all but absent from Disney’s catalogue of the last decade, and it’s actually a pretty good one too. The songs were written by Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice, and though most of them aren’t worth much and are typically clumsily integrated into the pacing, “This is the Thanks I Get” (sung by Pine) is a movie highlight; fun and dynamic, easily the best song of its kind since “Friends on the Other Side” (which isn’t saying a lot but is still noteworthy). The other stand-out is the principal number, “This Wish”, not so creatively composed a piece, yet elevated largely by DeBose’s powerhouse performance.
The cute smiling star it brings to earth is implied to be the Disney wishing star specifically, and a number of moves by the film half-jokingly suggests it exists in a mutual universe with all other Disney movies. These can take the form of winks, such as in one song sequence where all the forest animals come to life, including a deer named Bambi, a bear named John, and a rabbit who bears a striking resemblance to Thumper; or in how Asha’s seven friends each correspond to one of the original dwarfs. But then there are sincerer references, imagery from other Disney classics, and an ending that patently infers the whole movie has secretly been an origin story for another classic Disney character. It’s not so direct as to be a genuine indicator of a Disney shared universe objective, nor is it anywhere as obnoxious as cynical corporate synergy might be illustrated, but it is still wildly pretentious of a company to reverse-engineer their trademark itself into a feature film. And yet it is a bafflingly half-hearted and hollow kind of fan service too, that does nothing for the movie –a dully minimal effort to commemorate a rare anniversary that feels only invested in out of obligation.
Doctor Who cares way more about its 60th anniversary than Disney apparently does for their 100th, which is astonishing to me. And Wish, for what virtues it does have, is the perfect approximation of this. Its attempts at paying tribute are cheap more often than not, and it otherwise fails to assert itself as anything more than merely a culmination of the studio’s late tepid ideas and calibrated structures. A decade ago the success of Frozen was a jolt of life for Walt Disney Animation. Wish has it in it to be that too but to a vastly different effect. One wonders though if Disney can even comprehend that. 

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