Wish (Walt Disney Animation - November 2023)

[Hawkeye_2018]

If you showed kids (age 3-10) the trailers for Wish and Migration back to back, and asked the kids to rank them, 99% would haver Migration ranked ahead

 

[DisneyHead123]

I don’t think Wish was a terrible movie, but I do think it suffered from being too meta. It looks into bigger questions like “What *is* a wish, anyways?” and “What is the role of personal wishes in society?” This message seemed better conveyed in Mirabel singing Waiting on a Miracle, Cinderella frantically pulling on her locked door as the prince begins to walk away downstairs, or Geppetto getting eaten by a whale. I guess that’s the “show don’t tell” effect of showing someone whose wish is about to be lost, or who is in search of a wish. (Also maybe notable that many Disney films included wishes that were somewhat mundane and maybe more relatable - getting married, having a child, learning to fit in while being different, playing music, and so on - there were fantastical elements to them but the underlying wishes were often commonplace events.) I do think they do better when they stick to personal narrative journeys. My complaint with both Strange World and Wish was that they were too diffuse, with too many characters and events to think about, which put them in the “good not great” category.

 

[Miss Rori]

If you showed kids (age 3-10) the trailers for Wish and Migration back to back, and asked the kids to rank them, 99% would haver Migration ranked ahead

Oh yeah, that was a far superior trailer and I'm not interested in the film itself. It clearly explained the premise and characters, which is one that's fairly relatable for kids and adults, and the style of humor. Same with the Wonka trailers, even if they were coy about it being a musical (as is common for that genre -- but then again, I think most people expect there to be songs in a movie about Willy Wonka).

With Wish the original teaser didn't explain much of anything, except it's bad if the sorcerer grants your wish but it's good if the star does? Oh, and a goat talks and it's funny because his voice is low. It didn't even reveal what the main character wants. Then the full-length trailers not only showcased a bevy of lame jokes and character beats, but didn't make a great case for Magnifico being a villain because even most children know that not every wish is granted in this life, and not every wish is good anyway. Of course the film itself contorts things so nobody makes bad wishes in the first place, and seriously they're so important to your being whole as a human you guys, but apparently it was too hard to make that clear in 2 and 1/2 minutes. And in any case just making sure everybody can make their wishes come true isn't much for stakes.

 

[Miss Rori]

I don’t think Wish was a terrible movie, but I do think it suffered from being too meta. It looks into bigger questions like “What *is* a wish, anyways?” and “What is the role of personal wishes in society?” This message seemed better conveyed in Mirabel singing Waiting on a Miracle, Cinderella frantically pulling on her locked door as the prince begins to walk away downstairs, or Geppetto getting eaten by a whale. I guess that’s the “show don’t tell” effect of showing someone whose wish is about to be lost, or who is in search of a wish.

Wonka has a surprising number of similar plot beats and characters with Wish (the protagonist in both even has to swim back to the city at one point!), and both rely heavily on shout-outs to well-known works but boy oh boy does it do more to examine what the characters specifically want and strive for, and how they're changed by their experiences with others. One thing striking about Wish's plot is how there don't seem to be any strong relationships between characters that directly affect what happens beyond the setup of Asha wanting Sabino's wish granted, and even then, there's not much of a payoff to it. (Can't remember who asked it elsewhere, but shouldn't Sabino have led the crowd in wishing/singing away Magnifico? And what was Sakina's wish anyway?) Comparing it to Wonka's relationships with the orphan Noodle and the other boarding house prisoners, and how those affect how he goes about pursuing his dream, there's no comparison.

Spoiler: Spoilers for both films

The payoff of Sabino's wish is the post-credits gag involving "When You Wish Upon a Star". By comparison, "Pure Imagination", which is threaded into the Wonka underscore the way "When..." is threaded into Wish, is finally sung in the denouement (with mostly new lyrics) first as Wonka reunites Noodle with her mother, who turns out to be a librarian (and Noodle dreamed of having a family who lived in a house full of books!), and then continues as Wonka buys an old castle and converts it into the factory we know. The difference in dramatics is vast.

 

[Sir_Cliff]

With Wish the original teaser didn't explain much of anything, except it's bad if the sorcerer grants your wish but it's good if the star does? Oh, and a goat talks and it's funny because his voice is low. It didn't even reveal what the main character wants. Then the full-length trailers not only showcased a bevy of lame jokes and character beats, but didn't make a great case for Magnifico being a villain because even most children know that not every wish is granted in this life, and not every wish is good anyway. Of course the film itself contorts things so nobody makes bad wishes in the first place, and seriously they're so important to your being whole as a human you guys, but apparently it was too hard to make that clear in 2 and 1/2 minutes. And in any case just making sure everybody can make their wishes come true isn't much for stakes.

One of the things that did strike me with the trailer was that it never really made clear what the big struggle was regarding wishes. For example, do the people somehow not know their wishes are not being granted and this is the big secret discovered by the hero? It now seems clearer to me this was because they hadn't really figured out that question themselves beyond, perhaps, they know, but they don't really understand. If that's hard to convincingly convey in the film, it was always going to be difficult to communicate in the trailer.

I'm not interested in dancing on this film's grave and went into it hoping it was both good and would be successful. The more I have thought about it, though, the more I am in the camp of wondering how this script did not go through further revisions before finally being approved for release. Perhaps that was because they had so much riding on this as the film for the 100th no-one was willing to pause the project for re-writes?

 

[Miss Rori]

I'm not interested in dancing on this film's grave and went into it hoping it was both good and would be successful. The more I have thought about it, though, the more I am in the camp of wondering how this script did not go through further revisions before finally being approved for release. Perhaps that was because they had so much riding on this as the film for the 100th no-one was willing to pause the project for re-writes?

Yeah, I do think it's kinda sad the centennial film fizzled so badly, but the claims are that this was in the making (pre-production on) for five years. Surely there would have been a "Black Friday" at some point where everyone would have realized "This isn't working, we need to do heavy revisions" if that were the case. For me, that the formal announcement of the film was about 14 months before release and had virtually none of the heavy creative hitters I would have expected to see on such a ballyhooed project (as others have noted, why did they go with Michaels and Rice rather than Menken, Newman, Miranda, or even Pasek and Paul on the song score? Menken had no problems doing Disenchanted for instance) seems more in fitting with a project that was thrown together in a hurry.

 

[Phroobar]

Yeah, I do think it's kinda sad the centennial film fizzled so badly, but the claims are that this was in the making (pre-production on) for five years. Surely there would have been a "Black Friday" at some point where everyone would have realized "This isn't working, we need to do heavy revisions" if that were the case. For me, that the formal announcement of the film was about 14 months before release and had virtually none of the heavy creative hitters I would have expected to see on such a ballyhooed project (as others have noted, why did they go with Michaels and Rice rather than Menken, Newman, Miranda, or even Pasek and Paul on the song score? Menken had no problems doing Disenchanted for instance) seems more in fitting with a project that was thrown together in a hurry.

Exactly. It's like Disney's A-team would have nothing to do with Wish and they had to use the C-team. There must have been something internally wrong going on there.

 

[Miss Rori]

Exactly. It's like Disney's A-team would have nothing to do with Wish and they had to use the C-team. There must have been something internally wrong going on there.

I was puzzled that at first there were only two "character posters" released (for Asha and Magnifico) until the rest of the cast list was revealed and there were no A-list performers, or even easily recognizable character actors, providing voices. (For comparison, Wonka had a double-digit number of such posters even though the bulk of the cast is U.K. character performers rather than big Hollywood stars.) This would have been such a fun opportunity to bring back a bunch of actors who appeared in previous Animated Canon films to do supporting roles and even cameos.

 

[brideck]

One of the things that did strike me with the trailer was that it never really made clear what the big struggle was regarding wishes. For example, do the people somehow not know their wishes are not being granted and this is the big secret discovered by the hero? It now seems clearer to me this was because they hadn't really figured out that question themselves beyond, perhaps, they know, but they don't really understand. If that's hard to convincingly convey in the film, it was always going to be difficult to communicate in the trailer.

Considering that we've gone into the realm of political philosophy in our discussion, I think we've perhaps gone off the deep end in our thoughts about Wish in a way that the creators didn't anticipate. Should they have anticipated this kind of analysis? Perhaps. Disney often gets closer scrutiny than their competitors.

But it occurred to me in the car today when Sara Bareilles' cover of When You Wish Upon a Star came on that I'm certain the creators didn't expect people to struggle with identifying Magnifico as a villain. He's in direct violation of what is essentially the Disney anthem:

"If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do"

Magnifico, on the other hand, labels the vast majority of the wishes as too extreme, even ones that don't strike us as particularly outlandish. It's only when dragging our real world baggage into frame that we as viewers get confused.

 

[LittleBuford]

Well, that's the thing. I've never taken to the CGI era of Disney in-house animation myself, but I do understand how and why movies like Frozen were such gigantic hits, basically being "Renaissance" (and I'm not talking Beyonce) 2.0 films in terms of structure, style, etc. Looking at the trailers, song previews, and some of the tie-in books for Wish, the movie looked weakly plotted and poorly made but I knew that was just my opinion and it clearly had all the elements for another princess-adjacent megahit, if not as big as Frozen given how moviegoing has changed around the world post-pandemic. I honestly didn't expect many of the professional reviews to reflect the opinion I gained from my gleanings, or for the film to attract so many fewer eyeballs than, say, The Little Mermaid remake or Elemental despite having the studio's biggest marketing campaign for an animated feature of any kind since Frozen II.

Going back to the colossal year the company had in 2019, where movies like Frozen II, The Rise of Skywalker, The Lion King and Aladdin remakes, Toy Story 4, and three Marvel movies did robust business despite some of them getting mixed to vicious reviews from professional critics -- it's wild to see how badly things have come off the rails in 2023. Even in the interim, while they had significant disappointments/flops like several MCU titles, Lightyear, pretty much anything Fox/Searchlight made (due largely to promotional neglect), and the Mulan remake -- as well as the fatal treatment of non-franchise Pixar titles that might have thrived theatrically, particularly Turning Red -- they did have Spider Man No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Avatar - The Way of Water, and Encanto, which beat the odds with its box-office underperformance to becoming a genuinely beloved film on streaming with a healthy afterlife in merchandising.

I think part of this erosion of Disney as a "brand" (as Homer Simpson once said, "People can come up with statistics for anything, Kent. Forty percent of people know that!") isn't just related to politics perceived or real -- Disney as a corporation getting into controversies regarding its commitment to "family values" isn't exactly new. I think the dropping quality of some of their bigger hits is catching up with them. Back in its better days, the AV Club ran an excellent series of critical essays called The Popcorn Champs that looked at the biggest film at the U.S. box office for each year starting in the early 1960s - or second-biggest, as this was running concurrently with a similar series of essays on the history of superhero movies! Since that column handled Avengers Endgame for 2019, The Lion King remake was the film Popcorn Champs covered (this was written in September 2021 for reference).

Disney’s lucrative remake plan culminated with a soulless, joyless “live action” Lion King

Disney’s lucrative remake plan culminated with a soulless, joyless “live action” Lion King

www.avclub.com

I keep thinking back to the closing when I think about What Happened to Wish:
"In its witless and numbing repetition [of what people liked before], it might be the ultimate late-era blockbuster—the most representative example of that last little run before people, through habit and necessity, stopped going to the movies entirely. If the movie business, in its current form, is about to die, then it won’t just be the pandemic that killed it. The rote joylessness of spectacles like The Lion King will have a lot to answer for, too."

I'm not sure how to account for it, but I agree with you that the failure of Wish seems to tell us more about the moment we're currently in than about the film itself. Had it been released in 2019, I think it would have done significantly better than it's doing now. If Disney is indeed paying the price for mistakes like the Lion King remake (which was indeed awful), I wonder when the debt will be cleared.

 

[LittleBuford]

One of the things that did strike me with the trailer was that it never really made clear what the big struggle was regarding wishes. For example, do the people somehow not know their wishes are not being granted and this is the big secret discovered by the hero? It now seems clearer to me this was because they hadn't really figured out that question themselves beyond, perhaps, they know, but they don't really understand. If that's hard to convincingly convey in the film, it was always going to be difficult to communicate in the trailer.

I'm not interested in dancing on this film's grave and went into it hoping it was both good and would be successful. The more I have thought about it, though, the more I am in the camp of wondering how this script did not go through further revisions before finally being approved for release. Perhaps that was because they had so much riding on this as the film for the 100th no-one was willing to pause the project for re-writes?

I thought the trailer was quite poor, and I agree the script could have used refining. The issue with Magnifico's regime seems clear enough to me, though. Someone upthread offered a pretty good lottery analogy [ETA: it was @brideck, I believe]: you know your numbers might not come up, but you expect them at least to be in play. Magnifico, however, is stacking the deck such that only wishes he deems safe have any chance of being granted.

 

[brideck]

Exactly. It's like Disney's A-team would have nothing to do with Wish and they had to use the C-team. There must have been something internally wrong going on there.

For me, it's more that there was a massive disconnect between the resources used on the movie and its expectations. How do you make an event movie, which is essentially what it takes to get a big box office in this market, without having an extremely well-known name attached to it as a character, actor, or songwriter? Being able to promote something as "Music by Lin-Manuel Miranda", etc. would automatically put a certain amount of butts in seats.

I don't know, maybe they should have leaned more into the nostalgia/Easter egg aspect of it in the marketing. Audiences have been trained to enjoy looking for that stuff, but from my recollection there's nothing really in the trailers/ads that hints at that being a part of the movie. Edit: If you really wanted this to be the Disney 100 movie, then play it up as literally celebrating the company's output from over the years. Put little tidbits in there for fans of everything that's come before. Would you sacrifice something in order to stuff it full of that sort of thing? Absolutely, but people are forgiving of a certain amount of self-indulgence if it's done in a fun way, and this occasion would really be the only chance you'd get to do something like that. The half-measures they went with (the dwarfs as Asha's friends, nods to Bambi, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, etc.) don't really seem to have satisfied much of anyone.

 

[Miss Rori]

I don't know, maybe they should have leaned more into the nostalgia/Easter egg aspect of it in the marketing. Audiences have been trained to enjoy looking for that stuff, but from my recollection there's nothing really in the trailers/ads that hints at that being a part of the movie.

I don't know if that would have helped. I'm reminded of the disaster that WB had with The Flash where so, so much of the marketing was based around Michael Keaton playing Batman again when that really didn't mean much to moviegoers under 40 or so. The various cameos/Easter eggs to other incarnations of DC superheroes in the climactic stretch were seen as ghoulish at worst (the digital recreations of dead performers) and "Huh?" at best (referencing the unmade Superman Lives by showing Nicholas Cage fighting a giant spider). Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny didn't exactly benefit from drawing upon nostalgia either. (When the big restaurant tie-in ended up being with Applebee's, I thought, "Figures.")

A lot of people who didn't like Wish openly complained about the references as being pointless, forced, and/or confusing, if not actively getting in the way of the plot and characters -- oh, Simon's become sad and listless since he gave up his wish, eh? Are you sure that's not because he's the analogue to Sleepy the dwarf? Or more generally, how the Teens being analogues to the Dwarfs sounds like a cute idea on paper, until nothing's actually done with them beyond the reference, at least nothing that one or two characters could have accomplished instead. (And I sure hope that the person who wanted a nanny for their two children wasn't born in Rosas but moved there as an adult, because if it's the former the numbers wouldn't add up... ) There also seems to be a fair deal of post-movie debating over whether Asha is the Fairy Godmother or not, or whether Magnifico is now the Magic Mirror or not, because if he is then how does he end up with the Evil Queen then...unless Amaya... And perhaps worst of all, having the references to the other movies just reminded a lot of viewers of all the movies they could be rewatching instead.

 

[brideck]

I don't know if that would have helped. I'm reminded of the disaster that WB had with The Flash where so, so much of the marketing was based around Michael Keaton playing Batman again when that really didn't mean much to moviegoers under 40 or so. The various cameos/Easter eggs to other incarnations of DC superheroes in the climactic stretch were seen as ghoulish at worst (the digital recreations of dead performers) and "Huh?" at best (referencing the unmade Superman Lives by showing Nicholas Cage fighting a giant spider). Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny didn't exactly benefit from drawing upon nostalgia either. (When the big restaurant tie-in ended up being with Applebee's, I thought, "Figures.")

The Flash had to do something for marketing because of a) the Ezra Miller situation and b) everyone knew that the DC universe was already getting rebooted. The live-action superhero movie audience has itself convinced that if a movie isn't part of a bigger story then it's not worth seeing, which is crazy to me because if you're a comics reader, the company-wide crossovers pretty much universally stink.

A lot of people who didn't like Wish openly complained about the references as being pointless, forced, and/or confusing, if not actively getting in the way of the plot and characters -- oh, Simon's become sad and listless since he gave up his wish, eh? Are you sure that's not because he's the analogue to Sleepy the dwarf? Or more generally, how the Teens being analogues to the Dwarfs sounds like a cute idea on paper, until nothing's actually done with them beyond the reference, at least nothing that one or two characters could have accomplished instead. (And I sure hope that the person who wanted a nanny for their two children wasn't born in Rosas but moved there as an adult, because if it's the former the numbers wouldn't add up... ) There also seems to be a fair deal of post-movie debating over whether Asha is the Fairy Godmother or not, or whether Magnifico is now the Magic Mirror or not, because if he is then how does he end up with the Evil Queen then...unless Amaya... And perhaps worst of all, having the references to the other movies just reminded a lot of viewers of all the movies they could be rewatching instead.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the references we got would have to be done differently, but the Mario movie proved that as long as something is entertaining, it can be 90% references to other things slapped over an extremely basic plot and people will love it.

 

[BuddyThomas]

I'm honestly wondering when the corporate "reckoning" will come for Wish doing so poorly. I find it so bizarre, given how much from-the-top meddling is done on Disney's films in general these days (retools, reshoots, reschedulings, etc.) that apparently no one looked at Wish at any point in production and raised questions about its clumsy world-building and stakes, the look of the animation, the songs, etc. (I think back to the huge overhauls Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story, Frozen, etc. had.)

“From the top meddling” is not unique to Disney films. It happens throughout the Disney company. I have two clients who were hired by Disney to write a song for a Disney parks show a few years ago, and Disney controls every single thing. Their attitude is basically if you don’t like it, we’ll hire someone else instead.

 

[BuddyThomas]

If you showed kids (age 3-10) the trailers for Wish and Migration back to back, and asked the kids to rank them, 99% would haver Migration ranked ahead

Yup because the Migration trailer has poop jokes.

 

[brideck]

Yup because the Migration trailer has poop jokes.

A whole poop sequence even, plus Looney Tunes style violence. Migration might be perfectly entertaining (plenty of Illumination's stuff is), but I generally expect more than that out of Disney.

 

[Tha Realest]

Yeah, I do think it's kinda sad the centennial film fizzled so badly, but the claims are that this was in the making (pre-production on) for five years. Surely there would have been a "Black Friday" at some point where everyone would have realized "This isn't working, we need to do heavy revisions" if that were the case. For me, that the formal announcement of the film was about 14 months before release and had virtually none of the heavy creative hitters I would have expected to see on such a ballyhooed project (as others have noted, why did they go with Michaels and Rice rather than Menken, Newman, Miranda, or even Pasek and Paul on the song score? Menken had no problems doing Disenchanted for instance) seems more in fitting with a project that was thrown together in a hurry.

How dare you! The songwriter for this film was once nominated for a Grammy.

 

[Sir_Cliff]

Considering that we've gone into the realm of political philosophy in our discussion, I think we've perhaps gone off the deep end in our thoughts about Wish in a way that the creators didn't anticipate. Should they have anticipated this kind of analysis? Perhaps. Disney often gets closer scrutiny than their competitors.

But it occurred to me in the car today when Sara Bareilles' cover of When You Wish Upon a Star came on that I'm certain the creators didn't expect people to struggle with identifying Magnifico as a villain. He's in direct violation of what is essentially the Disney anthem:

"If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do"

Magnifico, on the other hand, labels the vast majority of the wishes as too extreme, even ones that don't strike us as particularly outlandish. It's only when dragging our real world baggage into frame that we as viewers get confused.

I think the reason political philosophy has to come into it to some extent is that the most interesting aspect of the story that I think both of us identified is the warning against authoritarianism. The other aspect that invites such reflection is what you have to accept for the story to be compelling.

Thinking about the Pinocchio example you raised, in that film you just have to accept that Geppetto earned the ability to make a wish as he had been so kind and selfless through his life but that Pinocchio can only become truly human by similarly demonstrating his strength of character. The morality around being considerate and at times selfless for the benefit of others is easy for almost anyone to understand and accept.

For Wish, you have to accept that all the benefits the come from living in Rosas are ultimately hollow if you aren't free to pursue your one deepest desire. Neither peace, nor health, nor prosperity compensates for not having that one freedom and having that one freedom is worth giving up all the rest. I think that premise naturally invites the viewer to question whether you really believe that and I think it's why for at least some viewers there is ambiguity about Magnifico's villainy and Asha's heroism.

Of course, it could also just be bad writing! I can't think of another Disney film where the message is so ambiguous.

 

[drnilescrane]

Well, the other shoe dropped today. I've heard from friend at the studio that layoffs have started and the untitled 2024 Disney Animation film might have been put on hiatus. (No big loss, it was more of the same from Jen Lee)

If that's the case, it's unknown what will be released (maybe Elio will be brought back to 2024, maybe push Inside Out 2?), but I think the plan is to try and get Zootopia 2 for 2025 and Frozen 3 for 2026/27. That's still a pretty aggressive timeline for Zootopia which only had its first internal screening a few months ago. They typically have about 8 during production before release, once a quarter.

It seems like layoffs have started for the animation crew as there might be nothing for them to do in the next 12 months. When production does start up again, expect WDAS Vancouver to take on more of the load. It's just the way the world is now.

In my opinion this is all good news as it's an admission the status quo is not working. Yes people will have to move around but it's normal for the industry.

2024 WDAS Title is officially off the calendar per Scott Gustin