In 'Wish', Disney Is a Villain Mistaking Itself for the Hero

Disney is a unique creature in terms of major corporations. Part of its “magic” is asking you to forget that it’s a company in the business of creating entertainment. In the same way they never want you to think that there’s a human being wearing the costumes at a Disney theme park, Disney requires the illusion that all they do is conjure magic. Your childhood? Disney made that magical. And when you watch a Disney movie or TV show or go to one of its parks, you need to feel that childlike wonder and forget that someone is not only selling you that experience, but also that they made a choice about what to sell you in the first place.

The studio has succeeded at this for so long because they made movies that resonated across time. A child could watch Cinderella in 1950, share it with their children in 1980, and share it with their grandchildren in 2010. Even as cultural attitudes change, evolve, and question what came before, the stories are universal and beautifully crafted in a way that renders them as timeless as the stories they’re typically based on. For myself, my childhood was dominated by Disney and Nickelodeon. As an adult, I never have any desire to see re-runs of The Adventures of Pete & Pete or Doug, but I can pop on Beauty and the Beast or The Little Mermaid anytime. Regardless of what you think of Disney as a company, their history, especially in the realm of animation, stands the test of time.

Wish, the studio’s new animated feature, is an attempt to pay homage to that history, and yet it ends up saying far more about where Disney is now than where it came from. It’s a movie where the narrative about Disney imagination collides with the reality of how Disney does business, and the ringing you hear in your head while watching Wish is an attempt to reconcile that cognitive dissonance. Had Wish come from any studio other than Disney, it could almost be read as satire about how Disney presents itself as a benevolent imagination factory when in reality it tightly controls what it brings into the world. But it does come from Disney, so Wish plays as either disingenuous or deluded, depending on how much leeway you want to give the studio.

Let’s Get Past the Plot

The film isn’t helped by the fact that the setup doesn’t make a lot of sense. A prologue tells us about Magnifico (Chris Pine), a man whose hometown was destroyed when he was young, so he became a powerful sorcerer who founded the kingdom of Rosas where his magic would protect the people. So far, okay.

But then we’re told that people of Rosas give their wishes to Magnifico when they turn eighteen. Their heart’s one true wish goes to Magnifico, the citizen forgets that wish, and then at various points, Magnifico might grant a citizen’s wish. If he doesn’t grant your wish, that’s supposed to be okay, because he’s keeping your wish “safe.”

There are so many questions from this arrangement. It seems like kind of a rough analogue for democratic participation (turning eighteen and entertaining into a process with the person who wields power over the community), but like, when you vote, you don’t forget why you voted. If Magnifico is a politician, he can’t be held accountable because no one remembers why they supported him in the first place. But the citizens know that forgetting is part of the wish-transferring process! And they’re okay with it!

The most charitable reading I can give to this bizarre ritual is that the citizens of Rosas believe that there’s nothing to they can do to make their wishes come true, no matter how modest their wish may be, so their best hope is to simply give their wish to Magnifico in the hopes that he one day grants something they can’t even remember in the first place.

Because everyone loves Magnifico (and a guy who only rarely grants the wishes of his populace doesn’t seem like he’d be the most popular leader, but okay), our heroine Asha (Ariana DeBose) wants to be his apprentice mainly so that she can get the wish of her 100-year-old grandfather, Saba (Victor Garber), granted. Saba’s wish is to play music for the people of Rosas. When Asha asks Magnifico why he won’t grant this seemingly harmless wish, he replies that the act of creation—writing a song—could spur people to unexpected ends. It’s quickly apparent that Magnifico’s benevolence only extends as far as what keeps him in power, and even something as minor as “Old man wants to play the guitar” could be a threat to retaining that power.

Let’s stop right here: Saba gave his wish to Magnifico when Saba was eighteen (I guess the people of Rosas age, but Magnifico and his wife Amaya (Angelique Cabral) don’t—but if that’s magic, then fine, whatever). Does an eighteen-year-old not think, “I want to play the guitar, but this is impossible, so I better hope someone simply grants me this wish?” That’s one of the weirder things in Rosas. There are supernatural wishes (one citizen wishes she could fly), but then you have fairly mundane stuff like Saba’s, “I’d like to play guitar for people,” (also, when we see Saba’s wish, he’s an old man in the wish he made, so I guess the wishes age with the people who make them?) There’s no reason for Saba to make this wish in the first place, but the film needs this innocuous wish that everyone can agree is good so that Magnifico reveals himself as unreasonable and Asha as deeply compassionate.

After learning the truth about wishes, Asha runs off and decides to simply wish upon a star, and then the star (who is adorable and named… “Star”) comes down and starts making things magical like having animals talk. Magnifico sees this as a threat to his power, and starts hunting down Asha. Thus, we have a conflict where our hero is Asha, a compassionate animator (during her interview to be his apprentice, she shows Magnifico a little flip book she made), and the one with the power to make the world more magical and tell the people of Rosas that they don’t need to go through Magnifico to make their wishes come true. If you’re creative and compassionate, then you have the power to make magic and help those around you. Furthermore, it would be terrible if one person had the power to decided which dreams (i.e. stories) are allowed to come true simply based on their own interests. And thus Wish, which wants to pay homage to 100 years of animated Disney movies, wants to position Disney as a power of compassionate creativity, while ignoring that as a business, Disney has quite a lot in common with Magnifico.

The Imagination Factory Is a Business

I don’t begrudge Disney existing as a business. The relationship between art and commerce is nothing new, and the hope is always that art with patronage will still recognize great potential. As a studio, Disney is fascinating because those two sides are represented in its founder, Walt Disney, who was both business head and an animator. In some respects, that makes Disney an inspiring figure. He was a trailblazing innovator, and you can’t look at the history of cinema without recognizing the importance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney also wasn’t a hit machine, and his risky films would sometimes flop quite loudly, as was the case with Fantasia. As a businessman, Disney despised unions, believing himself to be a benevolent figure who would bestow benefits to his workers without them requiring collective action. As a person and as a studio, Disney holds the tension between art and commerce, and the legacy of his studio has been at its highest when they make great art that’s also a massive hit.

However, it should be noted that while Disney is known for its adaptations, it typically leaves its own stamp on the material. While this means that something like The Little Mermaid isn’t as dark as its inspiration, the animated film we got still offers something exciting and worthwhile on its own merits. Furthermore, these adaptations pulled from public domain stories, history, and folklore, so it’s not like there was a built-in fanbase you could upset. There was no mass campaign of Hans Christen Andersen devotees in 1989 shouting “Not Our Little Mermaid!”

But as Disney’s fortunes waned from the Disney Renaissance and the studio tried to find a foothold in a new world where other animation studios like Pixar and DreamWorks Animation were pulling in audiences with CG-animated features, Bob Iger took over as CEO in 2005 and shifted the studio in a new direction. Iger’s vision for Disney has been one of acquisition and brand dominance. Disney purchased Pixar in 2006, Marvel in 2009, Lucasfilm in 2012, and 20th Century Fox in 2019. Under Disney, these studios have leaned hard not into telling new stories, but into stories that people already know. Occasionally, they’ve found room to create great stories within that mandate (e.g. Black Panther, Andor), but brand safety is always key, and that means never taking too big of a chance. For Walt Disney Studios, they backed away from anything new, and started to emphasize their live-action features adapting either animated classics or theme park rides.

From a business standpoint, that’s as conservative as it gets. Disney knows the stories it wants to tell, and isn’t interested in telling anything else. Moreover, no company has had a greater effect on copyright law than Disney. It’s a little rich to paint Asha as the hero—a person who thinks that wishes belong to the people and that communal spirit is what makes wishes come true—when Disney had wielded its capitalist power to to make sure that stories cannot leave their grasp. This divide is even more apparent after the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes when creative people picketed for a fair contract, and Iger said their demands were “unrealistic.” Perhaps the animators at Disney like Disney Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer and Wish co-writer Jennifer Lee see themselves as Asha, but they know they work for a Magnifico.

And Magnifico does not like new things. He doesn’t even want an old man to play the guitar because he’s so threatened by anything new. In this way, Disney represents Magnifico’s desires, not Asha’s. The film is a pastiche of everything Disney Animation has done in the last 100 years. Some of the Easter eggs are cute, subtle nods to past Disney features with some lovely bits of visual rhyming, but other times Wish simply goes for a clumsy shoutout like a character dressed as Peter Pan even though no one else in Rosas dresses like that. Magnifico plays like a mash-up of Gaston and Jafar while Asha is the familiar awkward-yet-adorable Disney heroine we’ve seen multiple times since Tangled. Even the musical numbers feel like they’ve been pulled from different musicals rather than a cohesive idea of what Wish should sound like.

Perhaps if Disney had been bolder in the 21st century, these callbacks would play as charming nods to a storied history. Instead, they only serve to emphasize how staid and uninteresting Disney has become. It’s a studio terrified of anything new, so Wish’s embrace of the past only looks like Disney’s present. A callback to The Little Mermaid doesn’t carry as much power when there was a live-action Little Mermaid movie six months ago.

Wishes are what we want to be. What we want to happen. They are hopes for the future. But Disney’s future is only a regurgitation of its past. If Disney has a wish, it’s that you never ask for anything more than what they’ve already done.