{"id":10072,"date":"2023-11-25T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-25T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10072"},"modified":"2023-11-24T20:28:59","modified_gmt":"2023-11-25T01:28:59","slug":"wish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/25\/wish\/","title":{"rendered":"Wish."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wish<\/em>, the newest film from Disney Animation, would have been much better if they\u2019d just made a fresh video for the Nine Inch Nails song and called it a day. Instead, it\u2019s a self-congratulatory movie with an adequate story, forgettable music, and almost no humor for anyone over four years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movie takes place on the island of Rosas in the Mediterranean, which seems to draw on Spanish, Italian, and Maltese cultures and architecture, where the population is ruled by a benevolent king named Magnifico. Before creating the kingdom, Magnifico lost his family to an invading tribe and chose to become sorcerer, and in so doing learned how to grant wishes. When Rosas residents turn 18 or emigrants become citizens, they give their greatest wish to Magnifico, who stores it in his castle for safe keeping. Once a month, he grants one wish of his choosing. Enter Asha, whose grandfather Sabino turns 100 the day of one of these wish ceremonies, and who wishes to become Magnifico\u2019s apprentice, only to discover that he\u2019s not the benevolent king he appears to be. Since it\u2019s a Disney movie and you know things will work out in the end, it\u2019s not much of a spoiler to say that Asha will lead the people of Rosas as they work to overthrow the tyrant Magnifico and free their wishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story here has potential, and the ending is one of the better ones among Disney movies, at least incorporating the film\u2019s themes of hope and community into a resolution that\u2019s internally consistent. Getting there, though, is a real drag. Asha (Ariana Dubose) is a mostly one-note character, driven by good intentions without much depth or complexity, and she experiences zero growth or development over the course of the film. She wins by being good, and by being smart, but that\u2019s it. She doesn\u2019t have an arc so much as she has a straight line. Magnifico (Chris Pine) at least changes as the film progresses, and while it\u2019s for the worse, hey, at least it\u2019s an ethos. There\u2019s something to be said for a villain who starts out as just a little bit evil and becomes all the way evil by the film\u2019s conclusion, and who gets there for an entirely mundane reason \u2013 he\u2019s corrupted by power. He wants something Asha has, but his story is ultimately one of absolute power corrupting absolutely. There\u2019s more depth to his character than there is to Asha\u2019s, and that\u2019s one of the film\u2019s main flaws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has more flaws, though, believe you me. It\u2019s just not funny at all \u2013 there are a few decent sight gags, maybe, but the Comic Relief Goat (Alan Tudyk) is just painful because you know he\u2019s supposed to get laughs and he doesn\u2019t. I can\u2019t fathom how this script got through the number of people at Disney who are involved in making movies without anyone pointing out just how devoid of humor it is. The music is also wildly disappointing; I would argue there are two decent songs of the seven originals in the movie, the rousing \u201cKnowing What I Know Now\u201d (which feels like a big Broadway number that might take you into intermission) and \u201cThis Wish,\u201d which has some clumsy lyrics but solid music, and plays a key role in the story. Magnifico\u2019s main song is dreadful, and \u201cI\u2019m a Star\u201d feels like a deleted track from a Kidz Bop record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there\u2019s the fact that this movie is a 90-minute celebration of the studio that released it. Rosa\u2019s seven friends map one-to-one to the seven dwarfs, without much embellishment or expansion. (Grumpy\/Gabo is probably the best of the bunch.) There are direct and indirect allusions to past Disney films, many of which are just too obvious to be enjoyable \u2013 part of the fun of references and Easter eggs is finding them, but most of the allusions here might as well have pop-up bubbles pointing them out. Even the attempt to nod back to the classic Disney films with CG animation that evokes the hand-drawn style fails, because the characters look extremely flat and cartoonish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wish <\/em>seems on pace to be the studio\u2019s third financial flop in its last four, after last year\u2019s Strange World<\/em> (which I haven\u2019t bothered with) and Raya and the Last Dragon<\/em> (which opened in March 2021, so the pandemic hurt its box office). I don\u2019t think commercial performance has any bearing on a film\u2019s worth, but Wish <\/em>seems to serve no purpose beyond making money. It\u2019s a movie about how great Disney movies are, except it\u2019s not great and it isn\u2019t doing well at the box office. With a slew of great animated films this year, including the second Spider-verse<\/em> movie, Nimona<\/em>, and the upcoming The Boy and the Heron<\/em>, Wish <\/em>probably won\u2019t even land an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, which would mark the first time in sixteen years that two straight Disney Animation films missed the cut. Perhaps that\u2019s as indicative as anything of how far the studio seems to have fallen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wish, the newest film from Disney Animation, would have been much better if they\u2019d just made a fresh video for the Nine Inch Nails song and called it a day. Instead, it\u2019s a self-congratulatory movie with an adequate story, forgettable music, and almost no humor for anyone over four years old. The movie takes place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1357,37,102,577,215],"class_list":["post-10072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2023-movies","tag-animation","tag-disappointments","tag-disney","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10072"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10073,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10072\/revisions\/10073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}