Wish review: This kingdom really needs some magic

It was probably inevitable that Marvel’s world-building virus would infect its Disney host. But it’s still startling to see how urgently the new Disney animated fairy tale Wish attempts to retcon 86 years of disparate animated features into something like a shared universe—one where Peter Pan, Thumper, and Pinocchio exist in semi-related plotlines, just like Black Widow, Moon Knight, and the High Evolutionary do.

The mechanism for this multiversal shift is a hoary old Disney plot cliché that Wish wants to reframe as a trope: the “Wishing Star,” made famous by Jiminy Cricket’s rendition of the lovely corporate theme song “When You Wish Upon A Star” in Pinocchio way back in 1940. Like the song says, when you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are, your dreams come true.

Or not, in the case of Wish, where an initially well-intended sorcerer king named Magnifico (voiced by Chris Pine) hoards other people’s fantasies. He does this for benevolent reasons that are hermetic and vague in the way only stories reverse-engineered to fit a high-concept premise can be. Magnifico was traumatized by a war that wiped out his family, and for some reason, he believes stability will reign supreme if he excises people’s secret wishes from their psyches and imprisons those desires in floating bubbles.

We see quite a few of the fantasies Magnifico’s subjects harbor in their secret hearts, and it’s hard to understand what the sorcerer-king is going on about, because nobody in his kingdom has an id. His people want to fly. They want to be strong. They want to talk to animals. They want to write a song everybody will dance to. They dream of having a family. A more stable community would be hard to imagine, because its wishes are not for sex, power, or anything else that would destabilize a kingdom, or even hurt a fly. In Rosas, a kingdom “located off the Iberian Peninsula” as the press notes say, the people all dream Disney.

None of this stops plucky young heroine Asha (Ariana Debose) from taking on the mantle of wish-liberator. In one of dozens of callbacks to classic Disney material, Asha interviews to become Magnifico’s “sorcerer’s apprentice.” Taken into Magnifico’s wish chamber, Asha sees the hopes of her community imprisoned there, and immediately knows This Is Very Wrong.

Asha’s special purpose becomes giving the people what they want, or at least restoring their ability to know they once wanted it. She wishes on a star, like Geppetto, and the star manifests as a plush toy snuggle trap so clearly ripping off the Lumas in Super Mario Galaxy that Disney has invented a backstory about how “Star’s” design originated in unused sketch art from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (yeah, sure). With Star giggling and spraying Disney dust all around, Asha and her plucky band of misfits plot their assault on Magnifico, and his virtually undefended fortress of dreams, inventing the talking animal and something meant to be Peter Pan in the process.

Wish is a mess, but there are ways it could be called an innovative one. In honor of the Disney centennial, co-directors Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck conceived Wish as an homage to the vintage 2-D look of the hand-painted Walt Disney classics, and as a result, the backgrounds and scenic design have the stippled look of watercolors painted on rough canvas. Unlike the Broadway-ready tunes of Frozen or The Little Mermaid, the song score by pop star Julia Michaels and collaborator Benjamin Rice is aimed squarely at the Soundscan and Billboard charts, a trend begun by Frozen 2 and fully embraced here. Most significantly, Wish is a Disney fairytale set in a world that isn’t derived from a fairy tale source. The lore here is adapted from old Disney product, and the fairy tale references are to movies based on folk tales, not to the folk tales themselves.

Everything seems political nowadays, so there’s probably somebody somewhere who’s going to see Wish as an allegory about Terrible Trumpism vs. Collective Action, or Big Bad Bidenism and how to overthrow the Socialist Grey State. But Wish mainly, and in some ways unintentionally, occupies a substrata of Disney projects mounted over the last decade that are a rumination on corporate purpose.

You may not have seen Disney flicks like Saving Mr. Banks, or Tomorrowland, or Christopher Robin, and if you did, they maybe just felt like middle-of-the-road movies. But the people who make Disney products frequently grew up as diehard fans, and they’re sophisticated enough to know the wider culture can be skeptical about the Pollyanna-isms of the Disney canon. Wish is yet another movie that says we need our dreams, and that it’s heroic as well as intellectually defensible for Disney to choose wish fulfillment as its corporate and artistic purpose.

Nobody on this project seems to realize how Magnifico, in his mad quest to harvest, draw power from, and selectively regurgitate the dreams of his followers, stands in for The Walt Disney Company more ably than heroine Asha ever could. Disney’s entire growth strategy over the last 20 years has been to absorb fantasies made by others—the Muppets, Pixar Animation, Marvel Entertainment, The Simpsons, Lucasfilm. While there’s no doubt the makers of Wish see themselves as dream liberators and not dream takers, Disney is like Magnifico—a monopolist, besieged by an audience increasingly empowered to seek its pleasures in a world of unlimited choice.

Like George Lucas before them, the modern Disney creators are increasingly making movies about the overthrow of the empire, while ceaselessly dedicating themselves to the empire itself. Though Wish is a wobbly monument to a glorious century of artistic commercial achievement, the anxiety it masks behind the usual palette of color and song feels almost too real.