By Owen Glancy
Asst. Arts & Features Editor
“Wish” is the latest animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studio made for their 100-year anniversary. Seeing as this film was made to celebrate the studio’s illustrious 100-year lifespan, there is a lot riding on its shoulders.
So, did it live up to expectations? Absolutely not.
The film has a lot of problems, but it does boast one strength, Chris Pine. His performance as King Magnifico is surprisingly excellent. You can tell that he’s having a ton of fun in the recording booth really hamming up this villain. It’s a performance so good that it made me wish we got more Magnifico, despite him already being in a ton of the film.
However, Pine’s performance couldn’t save the poor writing that plagues this film. Every character and story beat has been done before, and better. This feels like every Disney movie from the past 10 years poorly stitched together in an attempt to create a coherent film.
The biggest problems in the writing department come from the protagonist and antagonist. Asha is the most generic Disney protagonist I’ve seen in a while. It feels like they took all the things that made Moana and Mirabel unique and stripped away all the personality. Nothing she does or says is inherently bad, it’s just boring and safe.
Sadly, the same goes for Magnifico. He starts the film as a pretty fascinating character, but slowly his interesting motivations fall into the background and after a certain point even Pine’s voice acting can’t make up for it.
The animation is also lackluster. In an effort to pay homage to their 2D animated films, the animators attempted to make the 3D animation in this movie look similar to a more traditional Disney project. This makes the animation look extremely awkward and unfinished, ruining what could be a potentially great looking film.
Unfortunately, the most disappointing part of the film is the music. Disney’s last musical, “Encanto,” was one of the best films of 2021 and many of its songs became extremely popular. It makes sense that Disney would want to replicate that success, but the way they went about it was truly asinine.
Instead of re-hiring Lin-Manuel Miranda or another musician with a background in musical theater, they instead hired people who wrote pop songs for artists such as Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez.
Needless to say, this does not work at all.
Instead of leaning into their strengths, these new writers and producers attempted to emulate Miranda’s musical style and came up frightfully short.
Each single song is more forgettable than the last, and due to the aforementioned animation issues, the visuals can’t even save the scenes they’re in.
While the quality of Disney animated films, with the exception of “Encanto,” has been low in the past five years, this is the first one to feel like it was made by the Disney company, not the Disney animation studio. This brings up a crucial question, was there AI used in the making of this film?
While there is no concrete proof AI was used in the making of this film, the fact that it feels so much like the product of AI speaks volumes to the overall quality of “Wish.” Nothing in the film is outlandishly awful, but there’s nothing good about it either with only one exception.
“Wish” is not a movie that will offend anyone. It isn’t a film that will make you regret seeing it, and you definitely won’t walk out of the theater halfway through due to how short it is. But it isn’t a movie that does anything new or interesting. It plays it extremely safe in every aspect and due to this, while it isn’t the worst film I’ve seen this year, it is undoubtedly the most boring.
Rating: D+
I wish this was better