ANI-MOVIES, *Wish

To celebrate their centennial anniversary, Disney thought that doing one big session of circle jerking was long overdue. Wish is a bloated display of egotistical entropy that was just a revarnished clip show with a plot that normally would make for a feature that would barely cover 25 minutes. Planning for this wreck had been going on for over five years prior to its release, but even given that amount of time with a majority of Disney's "talent" working on it and the company's vast finances to back it, Wish was not worth it. The animation quality is not that much better than what was done for Tangled over a decade before it, so you would be better off just watching that on Freeform instead of wasting your time and money on overpriced theater tickets for. This self-gratuitous exposition of Disney's legacy of course also had to be a musical as well, and the songs are about as memorable as a case of terminal amnesia. Wish's more diverse cast helps keep the company's trend of trying to appeal to a wider audience other than just middle-class Americans, even though it also works against it as you're not really given any context if this is supposed to happen in the real world, or at least a fantasy version of it. The movie tries to begin like a standard Golden Age Disney movie with a storybook opening up, but it's all downhill from this point on.

Ages ago in the Mediterranean lies the island kingdom of Rosas ruled by the supposedly benevolent sorcerer Magnifico who accepts the wishes of his people with the promise of granting someone's wish once a month. A young lady called Asha is on his staff and is interviewing to be Magnifico's new assistant, but instead uncovers the secret he's been hiding from the citizens for years to gain their unconditional trust that he covets their sealed off wishes. Asha goes to wish upon a star which actually comes down from the skies as a living little smartphone icon that starts to work its own kind of magic by giving animals the ability to speak. The star referred to as Star helps Asha realize that she should try to free the wishes from Magnifico's grasp. The corrupt leader knows about the fallen star and plots to take if for himself to gain even more power. The rest of the film is a series of bad musical numbers and rotating characters as Asha tries to liberate the kingdom's wishes. The movie gives no real effort to understanding if Magnifico's original intentions slowly turned him bad from using dark magic, or if he was always a power mad despot.

Wish is an incomplete chain of events that was strung together with an impulsive need for Disney to show off their hugely animated catalog spanning nearly a century. The supporting cast are just copy/pastes of previous Disney characters, not to mention the entire royal staff is just a reincarnation of the Seven Dwarves. Asha is a boring Disney princess-type without really being a princess, and her whole story is nothing more than an origin story for a fairy godmother. The villain's motivations seem to change at the drop of a hat, constantly being in flux as to whether he wants his people's loyalty or if he just keeps getting crazier from dabbling in dark magic. Very young children might be slightly charmed by it at first, but would forget it once they get old enough to realize that movie is just one big mess. I've seen jumbled mockbuster rip offs that were more coherent than Wish. The movie is a wild goose chase totally void of anything endearing and not worth the effort on either the creators or its intended viewers.