Wish

Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”

I really wanted to like the Disney-affiliated Kingdom Hearts video games, but I found them unbearable for one specific reason: After concepts like "heart" and "darkness" were literalized into actual material things within the world of the game, the characters would endlessly discuss them, repeating those same words until you thought your ears were going to bleed if you heard them one more time. It's a kind of torture listening to them repeated so many times.

What heart and darkness were to those games, "wish" is to the movie Wish. In this fairy tale, wishes are turned into tangible objects, and nobody will talk about any other subject for an hour and a half, nor will they use synonyms like "hopes" or "dreams" or "wants" to introduce variety. If you played a drinking game and took a drink when you heard another mention of a wish, you'd be unconscious before the movie ended.

There's an idea for a much more interesting take on the material that is quickly abandoned because this is a light kids movie with singing animals. When the protagonist discovers that the sorcerer-king refuses to allow some wishes to come true, he defends the policy on the grounds that some wishes are too dangerous to grant, citing anarchy as one possibility. That example is self-serving of course, but he has a solid point. Some wishes are dangerous. We repeatedly see one woman's wish to fly, and can easily imagine her suffering bodily injury. The protagonist's response that all wishes should get a chance to come true, which becomes the movie's cause, is, well, dumb. A smarter movie would have had her accidentally grant everyone's wishes and see the kingdom collapse into amusing chaos and have to help the king put everything back to normal, with a "be careful what you wish for" moral. And I know that Disney is familiar with that more thought-provoking take on the material, because what I just described is basically Fantasia. That animated classic remains a pop-culture touchstone after eight decades, but Wish has been out for eight months and already feels forgotten. "You are entitled to want anything and get it" is simply not a framework for material that audiences will love for generations.

This movie isn't just shallow in its story; it also feels rushed on the surface. The animation is too quick and it's hard to make out what's happening in the more frenetic moments. Apart from the protagonist and king's elaborate costumes, the character design is simplistic. There's one good song, when the protagonist's friends are inspired to join her in plotting a revolution, and the rest feel forgettable. The "Star" character is so literally a living plot device that when the conflict is resolved and Star can finally do anything that it (he? she?) wants, it desires only to return to the sky so that it can grant more wishes for more people, conveniently abandoning the curiosity and playfulness that it showed earlier.

I'm sure that a lot of people worked very hard to make this movie, but it still feels rushed and half-developed, as if Disney hurried it into production to meet a deadline so that it could play in theaters for the company's 100th anniversary. It's chockablock with references to the company's many earlier films, and spotting all of those callbacks and Easter eggs is fun in its own way. I didn't hate the movie, but I wish it had been better.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− June 16, 2024 • more by Scott • log in or register to reply