If we were in full-on Scrooge mood we might argue that the film pitched to celebrate 100 years of Disney animation is a worthy successor to the likes of Chicken Little and The Rescuers Down Under. That wouldn’t be quite fair. Wish is a perfectly serviceable effusion of the post-Frozen proto-princess accommodation. Ariana DeBose is in typically fine timbre as the voice of a young woman struggling to shake off fairy-tale tyranny. You already know that she has a moment perched on an elevated area opening her tonsils triumphantly to the sky. Why complain about that repeated trope when Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice’s songs crackle with such irresistible choruses? At All Costs gives DeBose a see-sawing duet with Chris Pine. The percussive Knowing What I Know Now would, if such an unlikely thing came to pass, stop any Broadway translation on a nightly basis. And it’s got a cute talking goat. And a sentient grounded star that, in its simplicity, looks to be gesturing to friendly rivals in Studio Ghibli. What’s not to like?
Well, for all the references to golden-era Disney, Wish struggles with similar issues to much recent Mouse House animation. As in Elemental, the film’s apparent allegory fails to land. A storybook opening introduces us to King Magnifico (Pine), a magician who constructs a city that welcomes all those who want to fulfil a personal dream. Is this about the United States? Is Wish The Godfather? Well, maybe. But it gets more complicated. Magnifico captures every dream in a bubble, thus (if I have this right) causing the wisher to disconnect from his wish. Only the few who, at a special ceremony, have their dreams magically satisfied again make contact with those aspirations.
I have no idea what this is supposed to be teaching us about the human condition. Initially Magnifico is more of an unsympathetic technocrat than a proper Disney villain, more Herbert Hoover than Richard Nixon, but when DeBose’s Asha pushes back, the familiar green shadows cast themselves across his witchy brow. She wishes upon a star (get it?) and brings just such pointed plasma to earth. And we’re off.
The film will do well enough. But its backwards glances serve only to remind us how transcendent Disney animation once was – as recently as Frozen – without offering any hopeful signposts to the future. But, yes, cracking songs.
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Wish is in cinemas from Friday, November 24th
