Wish (2023)

Wish (2023)

3/10

Starring the voices of

Ariana DeBose

Chris Pine

Alan Tudyk

Angelique Cabral

 

Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn

 

Wish is Disney's 62nd theatrical animated production, and it follows their abysmal 61^st animated production, Strange World. Wish is more disappointing than their last production, Strange World, and the horrible story is not something you would expect from the Mouse House. For a long time, since Zootopia (2016) and Moana (2016), Disney has struggled to create an animation that makes you want to see a second part with the same characters facing another animated adventure. This film has forgettable characters that leave no impact on the viewer, and the film altogether is so poor, it is the last thing you would think Disney could produce.

Wish is a combination of CGI and feels like old traditional animation. They added some singing to it, which fails to matter the way the songs of Encanto captured the world who could not stop talking about Bruno.

The story is about a magician who lives and runs an island as a king. People travel far and wide to come live on this island because, when they are eighteen, they give him their wish, and once a year, he chooses one of the wishes to grant. The sad thing is, when he takes their wish, he erases their memory of it, leaving them with a feeling that something is missing in their life. Asha is a seventeen-year-old young lady whose dream was to be an apprentice to the magician, King Magnifico. Upon her interview, she discovers all the above about the wishes taken from the people and asks why the King never gives the wishes back. She could not understand why Magnifico would not let people work on making their dreams come true since he would not assist. This created a barrier between the King and his potential apprentice. In her sadness, she makes a wish on a star. The star comes down to her, and Magnifico notices that someone on his island is using magic. In his fear of losing control over what he has built on this island, he turns to the dark side to capture this person and bring the whole island back under his control.

By the film's end, I felt Disney needed to stop production on all these lame excuses for a film and just go back to the old ways, even their revenue shows that these new ways of production do not work.

There is something wrong with the present times, with even being bad sugar-coated to make it look a bit sweet. I remember back when I was younger, when Scar killed Mufasa, or when Bambi’s mother was shot, you could tell how cruel the world was, and we were forced to face it head-on as kids. Even when they decided to soft-pedal these dark themes, we still had clear and obvious bad characters depicted as cruel, like Yzma in Emperor’s New Groove or Hades in Hercules. There was a distinct way you could tell bad from good. Things have changed now, with being bad remixed as being misunderstood. Everyone is trying to be politically correct and fit into the common trend of being hip, which is ruining all Disney titles, be it from Marvel, Pixar, or Disney animation.