Wish - A Pseudo-Review

I Wish-ed that I saw something else.

If you have a moment, I’d like to ask you to join me in a round of applause for Walt Disney Animation Studios. It is, I think, well deserved, as the good people over at the House of Mouse have finally managed to achieve an incredible feat. After many years of ceaseless toil, boundless determination, just a pinch of luck - and maybe a little pixie dust - the best and brightest minds in the field of animation have finally pulled of an astonishing feat that few would have ever scarcely believed possible - with this years animated offering, Wish, released on the 18th of November, they finally made a movie that is only, strictly, completely and wholly, down to the most minute fiber… for Disney Adults.

For years now, the imaginative minds of unparalleled talent within the hallowed halls of Walt Disney’s studios have been working around the clock to perfect the formula that would, finally, make a movie that was not for children, not for families, not for anyone save for what might just be the most annoying people on Earth. This formula has, it seems, been honed to immaculate effect, down to the point can be said to scientifically, definitively been used to craft a movie absolutely no one but the most dedicated acolytes of the Disney brand enjoyed. Previous projects such as 2022’s Strange World and 2021’s Raya and the Last Dragon came close to proving the success of this formula. In fact, I was convinced that the utterly abysmal, joyless slog that was Strange World was as close as Disney could come to making the epitome of hollow pandering to aging white Millennial neo-liberals, what with the pointless inclusion of a mixed-race, homosexual son for the white protagonist that had exactly one line about having a crush on a man and never said anything else about being gay again or affected the plot in any way, plenty of environmental hand-wringing, an ultimate message encouraging the idea of civilizational suicide, and even shoehorning in some differently-abled representation with a three-legged dog. Yes, they really did brag about how that was a big step for representing the differently-abled. A three-legged dog. Yet, somewhere, I harbored some small doubt that Disney could still do better. There were depths of suck that had yet to be fully plumbed. They could go even lower. They could do even worse.

And, by God - they actually did it.

Don’t listen to this unless you hate yourself.

And, as I sat there with my friend, watching a full minute of cartoon chickens twerking without a single smile, laugh, or even wrinkle of the lip on a single face in the woefully small audience, I realized - the madmen had finally done it; they made the definitive movie for Disney adults. You know the type.

The custom-made masks. The baby yoda is a hand-made baby carrier. The average BMI. This picture is truly evergreen.

Soulless bugmen. Redditor types. Funko Pop collectors. People who soyjack unironically when they get excited. The kind of folks who spend more money than the average GDP of Guyana to go to Disneyland/world every year and make a sport out of taking pictures with every meet-and-greet character, cry when they see the castle, and feel up the poor fuckers playing Aladdin or Peter Pan or Gaston when they’ve had one too many Minnie-Ritas¹. The people who buy those goofy Mickey Mouse hats with their names embroidered on the front and lights on the ears and have one for every occasion, from Halloween to Kwanzaa to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and even a 9/11 Memorial one.

I cannot stress enough just what a pitifully failed attempt at zany humor the twerking chicken scene was. I looked over at the children sitting further away in our row and all three of them were sitting there, staring at the screen like:

Kind of like I was. And pretty much everyone else in the theater, too.

It is nothing short of an immense feat of bad writing to have a colorful, noisy, loud scene with dancing, singing animals and not just bore one child, but three, because kids usually eat that shit up like I can tear up a stuffed-crust pepperoni pizza from Little Caesar’s. That’s like falling out of a canoe and missing the water. I remember when I saw Madagascar as a kid and this shit had me laughing so hard I sprayed cherry icee out of my nose and all over myself and the guy in front of me.

I also realized that having to sit through the twerking chickens was what I deserved for being obstinate and opting not to see Ridley Scott’s Le Joker out of some misguided sense of refusing to reward his historical illiteracy and, apparently, a horrible mischaracterization of a rather major and important historical figure.

All I have are… les pensées négatives.

And, for a moment - if I could offer a mea culpa before you begin to shriek - rightfully - Yakubian Ape, you simian fool, why would you even go to see this cinematic paragon of suck! You should have known better!

Which, yes - this is true. However, it had been a while since my friend and I went out for a nice night out, and, with the hectic holidays behind us, we both thought that, hey - maybe a movie would be nice. Little did we know that this was, like, apparently the worst weekend we could have chosen to do it, but I don’t think we can be faulted for wanting to have a little night out to ourselves. We can be faulted for not just going home and watching The Killer on Netflix, which I’ve heard good things about. I have no idea what it’s about. I assume it’s just about the doggone killer Wendy Williams has been mysteriously alluding for for years, now.

And when it came to the other box office openings… well, neither of us wanted to sit through The Marvels, I hate the Hunger Games as a series too much to bother with whatever the prequel is that’s out right now, and I had the distinct feeling that the only other animated movie showing wasn’t really up our alley, either.

Call it a hunch.

So, yeah - we made the joint decision to sit our white asses down and watch Wish, instead. So, before you heap the blame on me, know that the responsibility rests on her shoulders as much as mine. And, you know, to be totally transparent… I kind of went in excited to see how bad it was. Like, I knew it wasn’t going to be good, no animated Disney movie since Moana is even decent, in my opinion², so it wasn’t as if I was expecting a Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin. Both of us went in with generously low expectations. I thought that, if I laughed once, that would be something of a small victory. I didn’t just set the bar on the ground, I got a shovel and dug it into the earth. And, somehow, Disney Animation Studios managed to take that shovel, dig up the bar, and then forcefully trip over it and give themselves a debilitating concussion.

On the way back home, I asked my friend for a review.

It was terrible.³

This is a review from someone who will openly admit that this is one of their favorite movies of all time.

And, yeah, the first Pokemon movie should be a part of the Criterion Collection, sure, but all I’m saying is that an aficionado of high art she is not.

At one point, she even went to the bathroom and was gone for, like, twenty minutes. For a good solid ten of those, I figured the leftovers from Thanksgiving we’d eaten must have done something to her, and was dreading when it hit me, but when she came back, she told me she’d gone into a theater playing Trolls and sat down for a bit. Just to break the monotony⁴.

It’s probably worth noting that, despite being out for barely a week, the theater we went to only had two fucking showings of the movie, which should have been an omen of dread in and of itself.

To understand just how awful Disney’s Wish is, I have to explain the plot. Even though nothing about the film, from the acting to the music to the art style and animation, is never much more than passable at best and generic, by-the-numbers, unremarkable, and dreadfully uninspired at worst, it’s the plot and the writing where the movie goes from simply bad to borderline insulting.

If, for some reason, you’re a masochist that wants to see this movie, or prone to make egregious mistakes, like me, turn back now - I’m going to spoil the plot, though, I’m not entirely sure you can spoil the animated equivalent of a molding Big Mac.

This is Asha.

She’s a strong, independent, racially ambiguous young woman. You can tell she’s strong because she’s standing in the generic strong woman pose. She’s determined, head-strong, and confident, but not too confident, and, sometimes, she makes a silly comment without thinking and makes goofy faces because she’s just like you, strong, brave, fierce, and independent Millennial woman. In a lot of ways, she’s a lot like Raya from Raya and the Last Dragon. And Mirabel or Marisol or whatever the chick from Encanto’s name is. And Moana from Moana. In fact, if you took every female lead in a Disney animated movie from Raya and the Last Dragon all the way back to Rapunzel in Tangled, but them all in a blender, strained out the contents, let chill in a fridge for twenty-four hours, and then removed? You’d get Asha. There is literally nothing to her character that wasn’t done before or better with those other characters. She even looks like them just with darker skin, because the art style has stagnated to being just as same-y, bland, and uninspired as the quote-unquote “quirky” lol XD randume humor, like… twerking chickens. Or Asha playing with her lips at the beginning because she’s worried that her oral posture isn’t right, which - yeah. Hm. Dunno if that joke lands the way they thought it would. Or having the goat - voiced by Alan Tudyk, who always gives 110%, even in a shit production like this - constantly talk about how cool and epic his voice is in little bits of self-aware humor that litter the script like deer pellets. I lost count of how many times someone mentions, wow, the silly little goat had a sexy voice! That’s funny, because little goats shouldn’t have deep man voices!

Hilarious.

I digress.

Asha lives in a diverse kingdom called Rosas, that, despite being specifically said to be located on an island in the Mediterranean, has the diversity of a flea market in Southwest Los Angeles. The kingdom is run by King Magnifico - very original name, might I add - voiced by Chris Pine, who, like Alan Tudyk, really gives more effort than he needed to, and at times sounds like he’s almost having fun, which, hey; I hope you did, man. I hope you did.

Magnifico has the power to grant wishes. Fine. It’s a fairy tale. That tracks. Every year, the subjects of Rosas give one wish to Magnifico, who, once a month, grants one subject’s wish in a public ceremony.

Except, these wishes take on a tangible form which is extracted by Magnifico, kept in his castle for sake-keeping, and, also, once the wish is given by the subjects to Magnifico… they forget about it. Which is kind of like… okay? So, you’re telling me if I formally submit my wish to get the hot goth dommy mommy I’ve always dreamed of - hypothetically speaking - to the king, I just… forget I wished for a hot goth dommy mommy? Does that desire just kind of go away? Or is my dumbass, by virtue of not knowing that I made the wish, going to King Magnifico every year, and he’s just shake his head and be like -

Christ, here comes that fuckin’ degenerate to ask for his goth mommy or whatever again. I really need to get around to having this stupid mother fucker put in the guillotine.

Does he take repeat wishes? Is he more liable to grant the wishes of repeat offenders who ask for the same thing, or is that grounds to go to be publicly pilloried for annoying the king? If he does actually grant my wish and bless me with the curvaceous, buxom gothic queen of my wildest dreams, do I suddenly remember that I asked for one, or will I just be like, Oh, wow! King Magnifico - how did you know I always wanted a six-foot six girlfriend with a domineering attitude and gothic fashion sensibilities?

Look, I get it, it’s a fairy tale and I’m overthinking the problem, but the issue with Wish is that it, too, is overthinking its own problems by adding little details that just make you go -

I hate the Cinema Sins style of critique that just endlessly pokes plot holes and nit-picks over minor, trivial details in a movie’s narrative, but Wish feels like the kind of movie you can do that with and not just be pedantic.

But again - I digress.

On the day of her crusty old granddaddy’s hundredth birthday, seventeen year old Asha - not that she looks seventeen - Asha goes to apply to be Magnifico’s apprentice, because that’s something you can do as a peasant, I guess. Very progressive of Magnifico to allow the lower classes of Rosas to apply to be his personal students, don’t you think?

Her interview with the king starts off well, but goes pear-shaped once she starts actually begging him to grant her grandfather’s wish. Because, y’know - it’s his birthday. Magnifico declines, which, in turn, sets Asha off into a petulant bitch-fit. This only exacerbates when she realizes that Magnifico doesn’t return the wishes he doesn’t the grant, and just keeps them because… reasons. They could have said that he was, like, keeping them so he could keep better tabs on their wants and desires for nefarious means as something of a parallel between intelligence agencies and Big Tech harvesting user data, but, it’s really just because he’s a big meany poo-poo head who keeps them because fuck you.

Anyways, Asha reads him to filth and he (rightfully) kicks her ass out and, to add insult to injury, vows to never grant a wish to anyone in her family going forward.

Seems harsh, but, again - think about it. The guy is royalty. Out of nothing but generosity, he opens his doors to take in an apprentice, and is willing to humor any and all, regardless of social class or economic standing, only for this uppity little bint to come storming in there and not just beg him to grant her granddad’s wish, but, when he gracefully declines, she starts casting aspersions and slinging mud?

Like, excuse you?

Who’s supposed to be the bad guy here? Is it the king who had the decency to grant an interview to someone of the lower class, or some ghetto trash strumpet who threw a fit when he declined her nepotistic request?

Oh, and the reason he even declines to grant her grandfather’s wish is because it’s vague. The old man’s wish, apparently, was to inspire people. How? Don’t worry about it. Well, the senile old fart didn’t fill in the blanks, and Magnifico, being wise and cautious, didn’t want to grant a wish carte blanche that could imperil the island and his rule and cause all sorts of political instability. Asha says its because he’s afraid that the wish might threaten his power, which… yeah? Maybe? Can you blame the guy for being careful? If I went to King Magnifico and said, Hey, broski, I’d be super-duper awesome if you granted my wish for an RPG launcher and two truck-loads of rockets. No, I’m not gonna tell you why. But I’m not going to do anything bad with it. Promise. Do you think he’d be in the wrong for telling me to fuck off?

Oh, and - if you forget your wish when you give it to King Magnifico, how the fuck does Asha even know what her grandfather’s wish is? It’s not like he could remember it, so he didn’t tell her. Did she overhear it once? Maybe she found it in Magnifico’s castle and I just forgot, but, still - you see the problems here, right?

So, I’ll try to make the rest of this brief. Asha wishes upon a star, which actually comes down, and it’s a cute, non-verbal little creature that makes cute, squeaky noises and does cute, squeaky things, and, really, they were trying to make this thing like a Minion, and while it is cuter than those little goggle-eyed fuckers, and significantly less annoying, it’s competing with the goat voiced by Alan Tudyk as the goat for the designated cute thing of the film.

You just know this thing was designed in a lab to be the most generically cute and easily marketable character ever.

Asha wants to reclaim her family’s wishes from Magnifico with the help of the star. Why? How? What will that even do for them if Magnifico is the only one who can even grant them?

Oh, the star’s name is also Star. I mean, they could have gone with, like, Polaris or Arcturus, maybe even Constellation or fucking Stella, even, but, no. It’s just Star. Disney did not bring their most creative writers on board for this one.

Magnifico becomes evil because he’s threatened by the Star’s ability to grant wishes. Like, comically evil. He comes off as a little dickish at first but he turns into a cackling, wide-eyed maniac in the span of, like, a minute, maybe. Asha goes into his castle to free the people of Rosas’ wishes. She has help from a conveniently diverse group of friends, who all band together to defeat Magnifico by… wishing for it. Or something. Asha literally just tells them all, if we wish hard enough, we can beat the king!

It’s kind of like the whole manifestation bit from The Secret, but incredibly lazy and half-assed.

Bazeema. Gabo. Those aren’t names, that’s baby talk. They didn’t even try.

But Wish saves the biggest gut punches for the very end. Because… well. I want you to study the above graphic. The names of the characters. The color-schemes. What they’re doing. Just… look at it. Think about it.

We’ll come back to it in a moment.

Anyways, in the end, Asha defeats Magnifico, who is trapped in his mirror because… reasons. Asha is gifted a wand by Star, who can apparently do that, who goes back into the sky and leaves her with the ability to grant any wish she pleases without the discipline, wisdom, and judiciousness of Magnifico.

Oh. She takes her wand, puts on her hood, and…

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

Fucking. Oh.

Do you get it. Do you fucking get it!?

THING! IS JUST LIKE! OTHER THING!

This is fiction because Disney Adults rarely look this conventionally attractive. But I couldn’t find any other young white women soyjacking templates to use.

Look. I love references. I love throw-backs. I love homages. I love easter eggs. I love callbacks. I love lore, I love expansive mythos, I love interconnected stories.

I get it. It’s fun to do little call-backs like that. It’s fun. But Wish is not clever about it. It’s not subtle about it. Trust me - they don’t plant seeds of subtle insinuation so much as bash you over the head with a hacked-off branch while screeching, DO YOU GET IT!?

Yes. We get it. And the general reaction from me, my friend, and general audiences seems to be:

Very… very cool? I guess?

Actually, it isn’t cool. It’s aggressively lame, actually. There’s no artistry to the call-backs. No cleverness. It’s not subtle. It’s not well thought out. It’s not something that’s designed to challenge you, or make you think, or connect any dots, it’s basically just there like a rank fart right in your face, which the writers then have the audacity to turn around, give you a smug smile, and say, Wow, was that cool, or what?

It’s basically just a way for Wish to get people talking. It’s a primer for YouTube personalities to start making TOP TEN THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WISH (Number Seven Will DESTROY YOUR SPLEEN!) type of videos. That’s all it is - a very thin, very desperate conversation starter that will hopefully generate enough word of mouth to get asses into seats.

In a way that’s very difficult to articulate, there’s a sense of insufferably smug self-satisfaction that pervades the entire movie. You really get the sense that the team behind it really, truly thought that they were crafting 2023’s answer to Beauty and the Beast, or even just this decades Frozen. I won’t lie - Frozen isn’t a perfect movie, and I got really, really tired of seeing it everywhere after a while. I would hesitate to say it comes close to matching the better works in of the Disney Renaissance period, but, when taken by its own merits, Frozen is actually a good movie.

Wish is not.

Frozen, in spite of its faults, is charming. Before you see it half a dozen times. I got sick of hearing Let It Go and Do You Want To Build a Snowman, but they aren’t bad songs, either. Just overplayed. And they got overplayed for a reason. They were well constructed, solid songs. Even for as much as I utterly loathe Lin-Manuel Miranda and a good 98% of his total output, I have to admit - one of the best songs to come out of the Disney filmography is this.

There is not a single song in the entirety of Wish that comes close to having the staying power of even You’re Welcome. Or any of the songs from Frozen, for that matter.

Actually, scratch that - the song that plays when the chickens twerk is a bit of an earworm. Not in a good way, though.

Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff are hardly portraits of deep, thorough, well-developed characters, but neither are Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Aladdin, Beast, and certainly not Prince Eric. They don’t need to be deep - just well written and good for the part they play in the tale.

Fuck this guy, though. The movie did not need this guy. Like, at all.

But that’s neither here nor there.

The point is, none of the character in Wish are charming. They don’t play their parts well. Take Frozen’s Anna, for instance.

She’s not perfect. Far from it. She’s naive. She’s impulsive. Undisciplined. A bit annoying, at times. She’s at loggerheads with her sister throughout the movie, but not because she’s stupid or an immoral, bad individual - she’s just poorly socialized. There’s a difference. You also understand where she’s coming from, having been effectively locked in a castle and unable to live her life for most of her adulthood. Of course she’d want to find true love, elope, escape, and live out a fairy tale dream. Of course she’d glom on to the first person who comes along and offers her that - it doesn’t even occur to her that someone could do that with nefarious intentions. That’s understandable.

Asha, on the other hand, comes off as a spoiled brat. She’s got a large group of supportive friends, she’s got a loving family, she’s got more than Anna has - with the exception of money - and when she confronts Magnifico about the whole keeping wishes thing, she doesn’t sound understandable or sympathetic or even logical; she sounds like a kid throwing a fit because they can’t get what they want. And, yes, I know, I know - she just wanted her abuelo’s wish to be granted for his hundredth birthday. Respectable, yes, but the reaction she has? To literally tear down the whole fucking kingdom? That’s a bit ridiculous.

What makes it worse is that, though never explicitly stated, it’s heavily implied that King Magnifico’s family were killed by bandits, and the entire reason he studied magic and became the king was literally to ensure that nobody ever suffered the same fate that his family did. Hm… a guy who became a veritable superhero because his family was murdered, and personally up-took a crusade against crime and degeneracy to prevent others from suffering as he did?

What an asshole!

And that’s really the biggest issue with Wish. Asha is a fundamentally unlikable protagonist. She’s not funny. She’s not endearing. She isn’t awkward or quirky, she’s just annoying. Her motivations are simple, and, yeah, I get it, it’s not like Cinderella or Snow White were asking for terribly much, but, again, I can’t stress enough how those movies are fairy tales in a way that Wish isn’t. Wish wants to be a deconstruction of the classic fairy tale formula - almost a Shrek-like parody - but the writers were neither witty enough to lean into the humorous approach of Shrek or smart enough to write a nuanced, introspective meditation on the subject, or even just question it like the narrative of Frozen. Not to bang the Frozen drum more, but even though that movie inverted the classic fairy tale tropes, it never felt as if it was insulting them, or thought it was smarter for not indulging in them.

Anyways, Asha just wants everyone’s wishes fulfilled. Sounds great if your, like, five, but anyone with even an iota of maturity understands that not everyone should have their wishes fulfilled. After all - would you grant this guy’s wish, even if he made sad puppy dog eyes at you and begged you on his knees to please, please, please just this one time, grant him what he wants?

Yeah - probably not.

I’ve seen cultural commentators on the right say that Wish is an inherently feminine movie. It indulges the female fantasy of making every happy, all the time, and living in some fairy tale utopia where everyone’s dreams can come true and everyone is equal, while the more masculine - and, by proxy, more logical, more intelligent, and more disciplined King Magnifico - is cast as a villain.

I see the logic. I’ve always said that fathers are the Bad Cop to a mother’s Good Cop, when it comes to a functional parental unit, as rare as those are in modernity. The father’s the one who’s going to put the kibosh on a misbehaving child’s antics. As a child, I always preferred to spend the weekend running errands with my mother rather than my father because she’d buy me candy and other shit that my dad would always refuse to buy. Outside of Christmas and birthdays, I can recall my dad buying me a treat once. Once. For getting straight A’s on my third grade report card, which wasn’t even an impressive feat because - not to brag - but I was a keen little monkey and I was always doing that. I can remember exactly what it was because it was such a momentous event.

Hell yeah.

Not to say that the mother can’t put an end to bullshit herself. Trust me - anyone who’s had to face the dreaded chancla knows that when mommy has to put down a disagreement, it will not end well for your behind.

My mom spanked me with a sandal once. Once.

But, generally, the father lays down the law. The mother explains why the law exists in a way that is palatable to a child. That’s kind of how the dynamic between the two works.

That being said, I disagree with the assessment of Wish that it approaches the narrative from a distinctly feminine view-point. I see why. The idealistic young Asha trumps the paternal and authoritative King Magnicifo. Girl power trumps the patriarchy. Black girl magic. So on and so forth.

But, I don’t think it’s a matter of the film, to crib a term from the progressive left, gender-coded. After all, my friend left the movie disgusted by the end.

I think it absolutely have everything to do with the audience the movie was made for. Which, it wasn’t women. I’ve also seen people say that the movie was written specifically to appeal to the sensibilities of twenty-eight year old white women. And, again - I get why. They make up the bulk of the Disney Adult demographic.

This is what Bob Iger is saying in his sleep as he is tormented by nightmares of plummeting stock shares.

But not every twenty-eight year old white woman is a Disney Adult, and there are plenty of men who could be rightfully slapped with that label, too.⁵ Again, not to belabor a point, but it was a twenty-seven year white woman waking me up out of a Sangiovese-induced stupor on the couch to rant about why Asha’s motivation was so stupid.

I’ve said it multiple times so far. Wish was made for one demographic and one demographic only. It transcends race, gender, and age. It’s made for one type of person; Disney Adults.

And, at their core, what are Disney Adults?

Okay, yes, that’s true, but what else are they?

Perpetual adolescents.

It’s why the story of Asha seems so inherently juvenile and unfulfilling. She’s basically someone who’s only desire is whatever she wants, whenever she wants it, and maybe helping out someone that she likes if its the right day, and she gets so mad at the person who tells her no that she quite literally upends the entire kingdom to make sure that everyone’s wishes can come true.

It’s a plot that’s as flimsy as its poorly thought out. It appeals to a very primitive, very undeveloped sense of instant gratification, and to an audience who just isn’t going to be too critical about the finer details of the narrative. It feels as if it was designed so these people could say, It’s a fairy tale, it doesn’t need to make sense to defend the bizarre logic of the film, but, as I’ve explained - this isn’t a fairy tale. Not in the traditional sense.

But, more importantly, Wish appeals to the perpetual adolescent Disney adult in the fact that it is, at its heart, one giant shibboleth for the Disney adult community. Asha is Cinderella’s fairy godmother. Her friends are the Seven Dwarves. King Magnifico becomes the Magic Mirror. These callbacks only mean anything if you’re invested in the larger Disney lore and the history behind the studio. If it was handled more artfully, tastefully, and generally more intelligently, it might have somewhat of an interesting twist, but… it’s really not.

The Fairy Godmother of Cinderella is an old white woman. The Magic Mirror is not King Magnifico, and, even if that’s what he’s supposed to be, how the hell did he end up in the Fantasy Germany of Snow White, which seems to take place in a time period before Wish. Again, maybe I’m overthinking the problem here, but, in the end, when the problem of how little sense these callbacks make and the callbacks are one of the features the script writers were so obviously proud of… how can you not?

The connecting tissue between these various properties, films, and IPs doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, it’s all an exercise in memberberries. Yeah - you ‘memba, don’t you? That’s all movies coming out of the House of Mouse are these days. Star Wars. Marvel. Disney. It’s all Memberberry slurry.

Oh, yeah - you ‘memba da Magic Mirror, right? Yeah! Yeah! And - and I ‘memba da Seven Dwarves! Yeah, da Seven Dwarves! And - and I ‘memba - I ‘memba da Fairy Godmother, you ‘memba her?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again - the Disney adult phenomenon spawns from, in large part, a generation of deracinated Millennials that have no tribe. No religion, no ethnic ties, nothing but pop culture to project themselves onto except and use to shape new identities and find people to accept them. Among these groups, they identify one another with these call-signs, memes, inside jokes, and shibboleths. Wish was largely made to tickle that desire and make these people feel included. It was a Stan Lee’s call to true believers at the end of a Marvel comic. It’s all about making them feel warm and fuzzy because, hey - they ‘memba.

Do you?

Well, I may not ‘memba, but… my friend did pick up on an interesting observation. And, if you take from this article anything - let it be this. We were riding back home and she was looking out the window with a deeply ponderous expression.

You look like you’re in pain, I noted.

I’m not, she said, as if I really thought she was. I’m just… thinking.

About the movie? I asked.

She nodded. Do you think that they even picked up on the subtext in their own movie?

I don’t think the people who wrote that are even smart enough to grasp the concept of subtext, I replied.

Probably, she agreed. But, like… it’s just - what were they thinking making the princess black?

Woah! I nearly had to stop the car. Was this about to be a certified Racist moment, here?

Girl, what are you talking about?

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat and said, Well… the king is, like, supposed to be the Magic Mirror from Snow White, right?

Yeah, I guess, I replied.

And, so - he’s white. And he’s defeated by a black girl, yeah?

Right, right, I agreed.

So, that means he’s the one who tells the Evil Queen that the fairest of them all or whatever is Snow White, right?

I nodded. Sure. What’s the point?

She looked a bit irritated that I wasn’t exactly picking up on what she was putting down.

Think about it. White guy. Defeated by black girl. Then he goes on to say that the fairest of them all is a white girl so white that it’s literally her name.

So… Snow White is only the fairest maiden in all the land because the Magic Mirror is actually the trapped soul of a racist white guy who got epically owned by a black girl?

ADDENDUM: You want to know what’s even more interesting than the racist subtext that may or may not be there? Well, it’s the Luciferian/Satanic symbology that’s pretty much right out in the open. This was brought to my attention by readers

Alexandru Constantin

and

ariana

, who both correctly identify this, because, I’ll admit - I was so distracted by just how arrestingly bad everything else in the movie was that, outside some vague connection between stars and Lucifer that it never even occurred to me. That, and I was really, really trying to read in communist overtones and elements to the narrative, and, by the time it came time to publish this piece, I was more than ready to be done with this fucking movie.

But, I also think it’s both important and insightful to point this out. I won’t go into much detail, because, if you have even the slightest iota of awareness of these kinds of things, you can draw the connections yourself.

So, there’s a king. He’s a bit strict, but he’s not a bad guy. He cares about his citizens. You might say he even loves them. He can even grant wishes that are petitioned to him by his subjects. Sometimes, he grants them. Sometimes, he doesn’t.

Then, there’s a girl who doesn’t get exactly what she wants from him. Her wish, well-intentioned as it may be, may result in… unforeseen consequences. Consequences that the king, wise with age, is aware of, but she, young and ignorant and short-sighted, may not consider. Well, who should come down to grant her wish… but a star.

The first thing the star does is grant a goat the ability to talk. And the goat not only has a deep, alluring voice that is constantly commented to be attractive, but also… wears baby clothes throughout the film.

Strange.

This goat then serves as one of the girl’s most encouraging side-kicks throughout the movie, who helps her accomplish her goals of dethroning the king so anyone can have whatever wish they want come true.

Again - you can draw the lines accordingly. Some may say that this is getting too deep into the weeds, or perhaps drawing parallels where there are none, but, well… if you know, you know.

But I’ve already given more thought to Wish than anyone involved in the production did. The thing is that, even if you strip out the memberberries, what you’re left with a movie that is mediocre at best and actively annoying at worst. The music is bland and forgettable. The characters are dreadfully irritating and never shut up. The gag-a-minute awkward, quirky, self-aware, Marvel-esque Uh, well that just happened! humor is aggressive and grating. The art style is generic, the story is constantly calling introduction plot points and elements to the narrative that only serve to confuse anyone paying attention, and the thematic, moral thrust of the entire film is basically just juvenile wish-fulfillment. If I could sum it up in just one word, it really would be a toss up between unremarkable and uninspired. But it was, I’d say, remarkably bad for a Disney movie, so uninspired wins the day.

And, from a studio that created movies like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and others, that’s really unacceptable. It’s easy to forget these days, when Disney is as ubiquitous as it is, their output has been on the decline for years, and the people who enjoy it the most are utterly intolerable, but a lot of the movies they put out aren’t just good, but, for their time, absolutely pushed the boundaries of animation as a medium as a whole. Reading the about the production and development of many of their films reveals a deep passion for artistry and storytelling. For instance, I was never the biggest fan of Disney’s Tarzan, but when you read about the insane amount of time, money, and effort was sunk into scenes like this -

Seriously, I can’t get into it now, but the effort put into the development of this movie just to do the vine swinging and tree surfing scenes was immense.

I find myself with a sense of respect for the talent and effort that went into realizing it.

Not to say that Walt Disney Animation Studios hasn’t had misfires before. They have. But even the worst of those movies felt as if they were trying to do something new. Push the envelope in some way. The unremarkable Chicken Little of 2005, despite being subpar overall, was still the studio’s first fully animated CGI movie. 2007’s Meet The Robinsons didn’t do well at the box office, but it’s actually a rather solid movie if you watch it.

I wasn’t raving about Moana or Encanto, either, but they still had their redeeming qualities. It still felt as if the people behind the movies actually cared about the end product and were really, truly attempting to make something impressive.

But Wish… Wish genuinely felt as if the team behind was coasting. They half-assed the entire effort, from beginning to end, and, like I said, there’s something about the whole thing that just really feels as if you can tell the team was still proud of what they made. And not for any technical achievements or creative aspirations - if you do some cursory research into the promotional material, the personnel doing the press junkets are more eager to talk about the progressive elements of the movie, like Asha’s race and gender, her gaggle of multi-ethnic friends, so on and so forth. You get the sense that they did the bare minimum to meet finish the product and expected ass-pats and accolades from the public for making the main character a strong woman of color and the villain a despotic, evil white man.

But, it appears as if the wider public is finally cottoning on to the fact that Disney is no longer making movies for them. The Disney Adult club may be big, but most folks ain’t in it. As I said previously, my local theater had only two screenings of the movie within less than a week of its release, and the audience was mostly other couples that looked equally as unenthused as we did, with a grand total of three families with five kids between them present.

I’d say I might feel bad about having actually paid to watch this trash and give money to the people behind it, but, with as much trouble as they’re having… hell, they can have my twenty bucks. It didn’t make much of a difference. The movie’s still failing, miserably and embarrassingly. So far, Wish grossed only a pitiful thirty-one million dollars on a five day opening weekend on a budget of upwards of two-hundred million. This opening isn’t just a low for Disney Studios, it’s a low for animated movies. With Wish’s box office prospects dim, it looks like Disney is about to eat another hundred-million dollar plus bomb right after the MCU’s latest misfire, The Marvels, struggles to recoup even half of its cost, and well within the same year that both Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Pixar’s Elemental under-performed at the box office, as well. The fact that Bob Iger hasn’t been frog-marched out of his office and put on trial for intentional corporate sabotage is as mystifying as Kathleen Kennedy’s continued employment as the head of Lucasfilm Studios.

I'd say that this may be the year that finally breaks Disney as the consequences of many years worth of poor decisions finally catch up to them where it matters, and in a just world where logic actually prevailed every now and then, it would be, but I also don't want to be one of those cultural doomsayers that's constantly prophesying the end of the current animated epoch. There's an entire cottage industry on YouTube of people who do that, and they've been consistently wrong for well over a decade at this point. Apparently, the progressive ideologues behind the wheel of Disney can remain irrational longer than the company can remain solvent. Still, despite historical precedent, I have genuine trouble believing that so many financial fuck-ups in such a brief time won’t pass without some sort of course-correction being attempted. Time will tell.

2023 marks the hundredth year anniversary of the founding of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Something about that fact makes the profoundly uninspired Wish all the more insulting. I’ve heard some people say that the naked references to Snow White and Cinderella make it some kind of a love-letter to the classic Disney Princess films, but, I assure you, it’s not; in fact, you can feel the resentment the creative team behind Wish have for those movies. You know they do. They say as much. There’s a reason that Asha has no love interest in the film - don’t you know? Love interests are misogynistic, these days. A woman is weak if she experiences attraction to a man, and a man is a horrid, lurid, perverted creep if he expresses interest in a woman in their world. Don’t be fooled by anything you read about this movie being some kind of celebration of the classic Disney formula; it isn’t. It’s just another raucous dismantling of an American icon’s legacy and work by cruel, petty, and fundamentally untalented people who hate him, everything he ever stood for, and the country and civilization he came from.

How you feel about Disney - the studio or the man - is almost irrelevant. Love the movies, hate them, adore the man, loathe him, it doesn’t matter. They aren’t perfect. But Walt Disney, the studio he founded, and the movies he produced are some of, if not the most important pieces of American culture to come out of the 20th century. To say Walt Disney and his creations are just some movies or just some characters is like saying this guy was just some singer.

Or that this guy was just some actor.

Me on the right.

I’ve said it time and time again - these things matter. Stories matter. The people who make them matter. The effort, the artistry, the thematic content - it all matters.

And, with that being said, I want to say that we deserve better than Wish. I’d go so far as to say we should demand better than Wish. But, then again, you look at the state of the country and you have to ask…

Do we really?

But, I’d also ask - are these people the cause of a failed culture? Or are they a symptom? Is there really even a difference? Perhaps it’s some sort of sick, cultural ouroboros with funko pop eyes feeding upon itself. These are the questions that I created this publication to ponder - and these are the questions that movies like Wish continue to ask. And, so long as Disney keeps pumping out dreck like this, I won’t have any shortage of content to keep writing about.

1. Apparently, sexual harassment of the male cast members in costume is endemic. I remember the infamously debauched viral tale when a cast member who played Peter Pan at the parks was recieving so much unwanted attention from drunken, horny, middle-aged childless white women he had to take a different position.

2. Encanto is strictly okay, but loses point for having a Lin-Manuel Miranda soundtrack.

3. Her judicious use of words is a nice compliment to my own verbosity.

4. She did the same thing when we saw Oppenheimer, absconding and leaving me to go watch twenty minutes of Barbie instead, which was one reason I didn’t think she’d sit through Napoleon.

5. I hesitate to call some of them men in any meaningful way, though.