Tired of the box office talk (Why would I give two hoots whether Disney makes money?). So I caught the Sunday matinee so could talk about the content...
Wish is terrible. If anything, the critics were being too nice about it.
The saddest thing about it is - the animation, from the world's premier animation studio, is awful. Many of the characters look unfinished. Why does Asha have freckles and full face texture, and yet so many of the other characters have that plasticine, solid tone, over-smooth look to them? Many of the characters except Asha look as if they needed another two or three renders on them. The bear character is just....what the hell? He looks like the bear from Open Season, from 2006(!!), and that was already considered a bad piece of animation back then.
The movement and expressiveness is god-awful. Does the studio have any of its talent left? Posing is stiff and unclear; where is anybody at the animation house to tell all the animators to keep pushing the pose? Design a strong sillhouette? To make things worse, The movement and inbetweening from pose to pose is jittery, this is either on-purpose - in which case it feels off-kilter for Disney's usual level of polish - or it's a technical problem - which is unforgivable. This...this is the company that invented the artform? Every character in the film lacks appeal because of this weakness. Of all the animated films I've seen in the last two years (including stuff released only for streaming i.e. The Sea Beast or Nimona), the character animation here is well and away the weakest of any of their competitors. It's miles away from what Dreamworks has accomplished in recent years (look at the expressiveness of The Bad Guys), to say nothing of what Sony's Spiderman films is accomplishing.
And the art design to look like a painting (especially watercolor) is interesting, except Spider-Verse and Puss in Boots did the similar things in the past 16 months or so, and they clearly did it better. Much of the backgrounds here feel like they need another pass, to brush up on linework and shading, because what they've currently accomplished is still reading pretty flat. Not enough dimension. Plus, the artwork lacks much of the texture that the other studios were able to put into their moving "paintings" (i.e. the brush strokes in Puss, and the incredible swirling gouache effect that blew everyone's mind in Spider-Verse.)
In short, Disney has gotten lapped in animation and art design. They were the last to release a stylized look to one of their films, and are by far the most underwhelming. It must have sucked being at the studio in the past year or two, and looking at release after release doing things that they haven't been able to do yet. What a sad state of affairs. How did they get so behind?
And this is just the start of the films problems...
Sadly it did not connect with more people.
