I very rarely get angry at movies. I don’t even dislike movies very often - I can enjoy movies of a surprisingly low quality. I liked Fast X. I liked The Flash. I even liked The Black Demon, for god’s sake.
But there’s bad movies, and then there’s movies that actively, deliberately, aggressively spit in your face. As I say, I rarely feel victimised by a film in this way, but sometimes one comes along that, like a private school boy giving blow jobs for drug money, was given every advantage and entitlement under the sun, and chose to waste it all.
Disney’s Wish is that movie.
Wish should be a classic. It should be, if not the greatest Disney animated movie ever, right up there, because it’s one produced for a momentous celebration: the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney Animation Studios. The 62nd official Disney Animation cinematic release, Wish should be one movie that everyone put their absolute best into.
Instead, the directors and producers and writers and executives who were given the keys to the magic kingdom for this film; the people who were given the chance to make a movie that would cap the first Disney century and act as a shining example of what Disney can be at its best; instead, those people said, “fuck it, the dumb bastards who watch these things will suck down whatever we cram into their maws, why bother?”
Because instead of a lovely tribute to the magic and the wonder and the joy and the delight that Disney has provided for a hundred years - instead of a movie that reminded us all that, for all its cold corporate greed and megalomaniacal exploitation, here was a studio that has made countless millions happy over the years, and allowed the talents of myriad brilliant artists to shine their brighest - instead of that, we got…
Well. We got Disney’s Wish, is what we got.
And I am so goddamn angry about that.
Let me explain Wish to you. Wish is a movie about a young woman named Asha, who lives in the magical Mediterranean kingdom of Rosas. The story of Rosas is told by Asha in storybook form at the start of the movie, and then again in an extremely lacklustre song a couple of minutes later.
Rosas is ruled by a king who has the power to grant wishes, but he only grants one wish a month, and when people give him their wishes, they forget what the wishes are. But even though they forget what the wishes are, they spend their whole life desperately hoping for their wish to be granted. Also, apparently everyone in Rosas only ever has one wish in their entire life, and once they’ve had it they never have another one. This is not, of course, how human beings work, but this movie betrays no evidence of its makers ever having met a human being.
Anyway, why does the king only grant one wish a month, and make people forget their wishes? Well he wants to keep the kingdom under tight control, because early in his life he suffered a terrible tragedy and doesn’t want that ever to happen again. Or at least that is his motivation for about thirty seconds, when they script hints tantalisingly that it might be about to provide an interesting aspect to a complex character. Then the king turns out to just be an evil bastard from the start. And a pretty stupid evil bastard, because keeping people under control by preventing them from wishing for better things doesn’t really make sense if, by making them forget they wished for better things, you just cause them to desperately wish for their forgotten wish to be granted their whole lives. The king has put in place a magical policy to block desire, which actually just makes everyone walk around in a frenzy of desire 24/7. This makes no sense, which is why it is in Disney’s Wish.
The king later becomes so obsessed with snuffing out any challenge to his power that he becomes corrupted by dark magic and turns into an evil sorcerer. This would be a fascinating character arc if it weren’t for the fact that the king was an evil sorcerer right from the start.
We know he’s an evil sorcerer because at the very beginning of the movie Asha goes to interview for the job of king’s apprentice. She desperately wants this job because…well we don’t really know this because they edited out all the scenes of Asha having a personality, but rest assured: at one point she says something like “I want this job”, so you can be certain she wants this job.
This, of course, is a fun nod to Mickey Mouse’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia, and sets up a fun and interesting plot about Asha becoming the king’s apprentice but pushing her curiosity too far, making a magical stuff-up, and having to fix what she did.
But this is Wish, where fun and interesting plots are banned, so instead Asha immediately discovers the king’s wicked secret, tells him off, and fails her interview, thus eliminating the need for any intrigue, suspense of ambiguity whatsoever. It also avoids the terrifying possibility that Asha might ever be shown to have any flaws of any kind.
Asha is very angry that the King won’t grant the people’s wishes, and that he won’t give the people’s wishes back either, because wishes in this movie are pretty blue balls that come out of your chest, and Asha thinks everyone should have their balls put back in their chests so they can…go on wishing them, or something. She’s particularly angry that her grandfather is not going to have his wish granted, though since her grandfather’s wish is apparently just to play the guitar one day, it doesn’t really seem worth getting worked up over.
Anyway, Asha wanders off in a snit, sings a boring song with lyrics like:
So I look up at the stars to guide me
And throw caution to every warning sign
If knowing what it could be is what drives me
Then let me be the first to stand in line
So carried away that she doesn’t even notice that her song is complete gibberish, she wishes upon a star. This is a fun nod - this movie is full of fun nods - to Disney’s Pinocchio, a classic movie in which characters were loveable and plots made sense. Wish boldly continues to go a different way.
Wishing on the star causes a weird thing to happen in the sky over Rosas. It is never explained what this weird thing is, but it makes the king very angry and he decides to be evil. The queen talks him out of being evil, so instead he goes back to just being evil.
Meanwhile the star Asha wished on has come to earth, where it proceeds to do some stuff. It is a cute cuddly little star that makes annoying noises, and it can grant wishes. Except when it can’t grant wishes. But it can do magic. Except sometimes it can’t do anything. Numerous times during the movie everything would be solved by the star exercising powers it has already shown itself to possess, but it doesn’t for reasons that remain opaque.
Anyway, although it can’t grant wishes, the star grants a wish, that wish being the wish of every living thing in the forest to gain the power of speech. In fact, not only do they gain the power of speech, they also know everything about stars and wishes and magic and the workings of the universe, and they all join together in a big woodland musical number in which they inform Asha that everyone is a star and that this in some way has relevance to something or other. This musical number is very bad but it does feature several fun nods.
Asha decides that the star is incredibly important and must be protected despite having no apparent idea what it does. She also decides to break into the palace and take her mother and grandfather’s dreams back. She enlists her extremely annoying friends from the palace staff to help her. Her friends are sceptical, but after Asha explains nothing at all to them, they immediately agree to help, which they achieve by singing another mediocre song while putting on some kind of weird puppet show in the kitchen. They are joined by the queen, who admits that she was blinded by love and now sees that her husband, who has been a bastard his whole life, has suddenly become a bastard and so she will now willingly help Asha destroy him without any sign of the slightest regret or anguish.
With the help of her friends, who all pitch in to do nothing of any practical use, Asha manages to free the wishes, but the king has scary green lightning now, which he uses to be incredibly evil at everyone. It seems that all is lost, but then at the last minute Asha remembers that she can sing, and so she sings, and then everyone else sings, and it suddenly turns out the king’s one weakness is more than one person singing at once, so the kingdom is saved. The king is trapped inside a jewel and condemned to an eternity of deathless hell, and the queen gloats cheerfully over him despite having been in love with him as recently as yesterday and supposedly believing that he was simply led astray by the temptation of dark magic. The queen is a sociopath.
Everything is fine now, and Asha and her friends and the people of Rosas have all learned a valuable lesson, which is…that it’s important to make your own wishes come true? Or that it’s wrong to let the power to grant wishes rest in one person’s hands? Or that if we work together we can achieve anything? Or that if an old man wants to play guitar, just let him, it’ll be less trouble in the long run?
The message of the movie is quite muddy, to be honest, but by that stage I was used to it, because everything in the movie is muddy - it’s never clear exactly what Asha wants or why she wants it, or how the wishes work, or what the star is there for, or why the king is doing anything he does, or what Asha’s pet goat brings to the movies besides a fulfilment of the contractual obligation for an amusing animal. Not that it does fulfil that because it’s not amusing.
The point is this: Wish is devoid of joy, devoid of feeling, devoid of logic, devoid of any energy or spirit of any kind. It doesn’t have a single character it’s possible to care about. It doesn’t have a story that makes any kind of sense. It doesn’t bother to establish or stick by any rules when it comes to its world-building. It has half a good song and a whole stack of painfully dull and outright idiotic numbers you’ll be praying to forget before they’re even finished. It has many references to better movies that it thinks are cute but are just infuriating because of the reminders they provide that it doesn’t have to be that way.
I’ve seen good Disney movies, and great Disney movies. I’ve seen some pretty rubbish Disney movies. But I’ve never seen a Disney movie as bad as Wish. I’ve never seen a movie that holds its audience in such contempt, that tries so little to even assume the basic shape of a good movie. I’ve never seen a movie that makes it so shockingly clear that everyone working on it could not possibly care less whether it’s any good or not.
Maybe it’ll satisfy five-year-olds, because it’s bright and colourful with noise and movement. Maybe that’s all that Disney movies have to be. But in that case, for the better part of a century they’ve been wasting resources making movies that are actually good, when all they really had to do was jangle their keys at the stupid kids.
In which case, well done, Disney. You’ve unlocked the secret to not bothering to make good films. That should save you a lot of time.