Wish review – Distracted by the mirror

A spirited heroine willing to make sacrifices to save her people. A colourful collection of allies, including one crowd-pleasing comic relief sidekick. Lush visuals. Cute animals. Hyper-expressive character designs. And literal showstopping musical numbers where the singers end breathless, arms flung wide, apparently waiting for audience applause. If that’s what you want from movies released under the banner of Walt Disney Animation Studios, you’ll be satisfied by Wish, Disney’s animated fantasy musical release for this year’s holiday season.

In Wish, 17-year-old Asha (voiced and sung by Oscar-winning Ariana DeBose) lives in the idyllic island kingdom of Rosas in the Mediterranean. When the film begins, our heroine jumps at the opportunity to become an assistant to the island’s ruler, King Magnifico (Chris Pine), a powerful magician whose tragic history drove him to found Rosas as a haven for all. Asha’s interview is going well until she discovers a disturbing truth about Magnifico – who locks away his people’s wishes between wish-granting ceremonies. Disturbed at how the king is gatekeeping “unsafe” dreams from becoming reality, Asha accidentally calls down a star from the sky with the same wish-granting abilities, and none of the reservations, of the king. Unsurprisingly, this puts Asha and Star in Magnifico’s crosshairs.

Wish is definitely one of the new breed of animated Disney musicals. It strives for greater representation on-screen – Asha herself is mixed race – and there’s a welcome diversity of ethnicities, body types and character ages on display. In a timely manner, the film also celebrates the defiant action of youth. Asha and her friends have a Greta Thunberg energy, uniting against injustice imposed by a single conservative ruler, and their rallying is paired with arguably the most rousing song of the film, Knowing What I Know Now.

Credit has to be given to Wish’s creative team as well for avoiding the trite life lessons that so often appear in animated movies, going a more hot-blooded route instead. Disinterested with mantras about the power of individualism, and being true to yourself, the overarching message here is that waiting for dreams to come true is passive and ineffective. Just wishing something out into the universe, and leaving it at that, may make you feel content but it’s not going to change your situation. You gotta shoot your shot essentially, and work instead of sitting quietly and hoping for the status quo to shift.

There are interesting things going on in Wish but the film’s biggest problem is that it seems more intent on celebrating Disney’s legacy than actually establishing its own identity. For the record, Wish releases during Disney100, the company’s centennial, and it seems burdened with that fact, as Walt Disney Animation Studios is the original, and still most iconic, film division of the mega corporate.

As a result, Wish is surprisingly self-referential. Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, Pinocchio, Snow White and even Zootopia are referenced in the film, which has an air of Disney-Prime, if you want to use comic book multiverse terminology. Asha’s friend circle is just the Seven Dwarves reimagined as human teens, and, if you pay attention, the film heavily implies the origin story of Snow White’s mirror. The end credits are stuffed with characters from other Disney films, and even the striking and sumptuous animation style hearkens back to the early days of the House of Mouse. Wish features a combination of contemporary 3D CGI, and flat 2D colouring with the texture of a book illustration.

It also doesn’t help that the film is 95 minutes long. Parents – and cinemagoers in general – may breathe a sigh of relief they’re not locked into yet another 2-and-a-half-hour commitment. However, when you consider that the last animated Disney movies in the same mould as Wish were all in the 100 to 110-minute bracket (think Tangled, Frozen, Moana, Frozen II, and Encanto), you quickly get the sense that some narrative corners have been cut here.

With half the film given away in the trailer, Wish races along with little to no breathing room. It’s a shame because the relentless pacing means there is no space for character explorations. The film slams the door on any interesting self-reflection from the villain, who could have been a morally grey figure. Also sacrificed is an upping of the emotional stakes. It’s hard to care when there’s evidently no lasting consequence. When a fan-favourite character seems lost, they appear again minutes later, no worse for what happened to them.

Wish ticks the boxes it’s supposed to, but if you look closer, you’ll soon wish it was something more. In the form that Wish lands on the big screen, it sits uncomfortably in the space between inspiring rebel spirit and soulless corporate marketing.

Wish is in cinemas from 24 November.