100 years. 100 years of magic Disney has brought to children and somewhat annoyingly obsessed adults alike. 100 wishes and dreams come true in the form of princesses, songs, and tears of joy/sadness, etc. Can Wish continue Disney’s impressive run of wonder?
The answer is…sort of? Starting with a classic page turning fairy tale, we open in Rosas, an island in the Mediterranean Sea. There lives Asha (Ariana Debose), an enthusiastic teenage tour guide very proud of where she’s from. This island is home to King Magnifico (Chris Pine), a sorcerer with the power to grant wishes. This day, she hopes to convince the king and queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral) to grant the wish of her 100 year old grandfather (Victor Garber), waiting since his 18th birthday for this moment.
We’ve never really seen a Disney movie celebration before. But the minute a book with calligraphy opens to tell Wish’s tale, a movie celebration means fan service over everything else. There’s constant references to famous films of the past, whether it be in song form (what does wishing on stars remind you of?), character parallels (Asha’s got a lot of smallish friends, and “sorcerer” should make any Disney fan’s hair stand up), or straight up 100 years of previous characters showing up in second long cameos. However, for total immersive fan service, Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn also homage a Disney story. Well, not really a story, just the bullet points of Disney’s most famous stories. There’s a plucky young heroine, confronted by someone cruel in power, with adorable, strange friends, trying to get rid of the bad and make everything good again through pure movie magic, with a little singing along the way.
The point here for directors Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn isn’t to be original with their storytelling, but to show that those magical moments can happen to anyone and anywhere, with only slight culturally specific variations along the way. And 100 years of many fantastic amazing movies to reference means there’s going to be some great highs along with the boring lows. The big soaring musical number, “This Wish,” is a banger, using Ariana Debose’s spectacular voice to rouse the audience up in their seats and look a little higher than they did before. Our new cute animals and other magical creatures are still cute as ever, showing Disney’s animators haven’t lost their touch. We even get a nice old fashioned universal theme about speaking truth to power, and the power of believing in yourself, that brings a rush the minute “This Wish”‘s chorus erupts in the theater. Sure the bad guy and story pieces don’t really fit, but even the best Disney movies have mistakes.
We can wait till next year for something original and complex from Disney. In this time of Thanksgiving, Wish’s nostalgia party feels warm and cozy, like a hug from a relative you haven’t seen in forever. What more could you want after stuffing your face with turkey, mashed potatoes, and sweet potato pecan pie? So I make this Wish…