Disney cartoon “Wish” in the cinema – When wishing didn’t help

In the anniversary animated film “Wish,” Disney enchants itself with the Disney style.

When Disney gives itself a film for its hundredth birthday, the title of course says it all: “Wish,” how else could the secret of the success of the most successful of the old Hollywood studios be boiled down to four letters? Company founder Walt proudly referred to his career as a self-made man whenever doubts arose as to whether wishing had ever helped. And thus also to a constitutive contradiction in the categorical imperative of “Make a wish”. Good fairies are certainly a nice thing, but as a rule you have to take everything into your own hands.

The setting is a fairytale kingdom called Rosas, which, like the Disney studio, is committed to making wishes. State doctrine promises that every wish can come true. In reality, however, a Disney villain rules who alone decides what happens to the wishes of his subjects, which he archives in the form of glowing balls. Most of the time he doesn’t even think about making them a reality – he prefers to get drunk on their energy.

One could consider this Magnifico to be a descendant of Michael Ende’s time thieves in “Momo”, but in the USA another reference is more obvious. He is reminiscent of the great charlatan in the land of Oz, who couldn’t even do magic. With the lavish musical from 1939, the MGM studio once wanted to copy Walt Disney’s recipe for success from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, which had previously broken all box office records. In return, the 17-year-old farm girl Asha, who sets out to put an end to the evil spook in “Wish”, rediscovers the Dorothy from “The Magical Land”. However, her odyssey only begins with the encounter with the fallen idol of the Magic King, who has no intention of fulfilling her 100-year-old grandfather’s wish – reinforced by a goat and a small star that she lures from the sky when she tells him entrusted with a wish.

An old school classic?

What did Disney fans not hope for from this film, which set out to fulfill long-held desires for a real old-school classic. But as a fairytale musical, “Wish” is more reminiscent of the Broadway versions of the old animated successes with its formulaic, operetta-like songs. The real disappointment lies in the chosen technology. There was originally talk of a revival of hand animation, which Disney now only uses occasionally in short films. Then it was said that they wanted to combine the watercolor look of yesteryear with modern computer animation technology.

In the finished film, however, this applies at best to the widescreen backgrounds, which, together with the villain’s design, are vaguely reminiscent of the look of “Sleeping Beauty”. A long-unrecognized classic, after whose failure Walt Disney himself buried his dream of a fairytale musical.

But what was already missing from the model, the cute animals that were previously obligatory at Disney, cannot now be replaced by the supporting characters – a cute but unmemorable goat and the glowing sky-dweller, who looks more like a Miyazaki forest spirit. In any case, “star” doesn’t become a star.

But a few long-forgotten qualities are at least coming to life: heroine Asha definitely has the endearing charisma of earlier adventurers like Arielle and Belle. And the story stays true to its simplicity instead of getting tangled up in secondary threads. And instead of fashionable hecticness, they tried to fill the rather short 95 minutes with peace and comfort.

The story, invented by Oscar winner Jennifer Lee (“Frozen”), develops a rather sobering relationship to the film’s theme of wishing itself, and thus the philosophical core of the Disney brand. Instead of expressing your wishes, you should keep them to yourself. Siegfried Kracauer, the critic and film sociologist, pointed to this dilemma in his review of Disney’s “Dumbo” in 1941. “Does an animator need fabulous princes, wizards and magical feathers to defy the laws of nature? “By including more and more fairy creatures, Disney has unnecessarily overloaded its films,” he complained in The Nation newspaper. In fact, the digital animation, which here only adorns itself with the appearance of Auarell painting, dominates the film with a naturalism that is far removed from art.

Only the famous mouse in the opening credits is a wistful reminder of what Kracauer missed in 1928, just 14 years after her first appearance: “In ‘Plane Crazy’, Disney’s first Mickey Mouse film, a car turned into an airplane – solely through the power of the pen.” And what does Dumbo do with his gift? Is he flying free to an unknown paradise? No, “he prefers wealth and security in a circus.”

The business-related vocabulary in the song of a little rabbit in “Wish” fits in with this, which Asha sings with the line: “In relation to the universe, we are all shareholders”. Translated into this ideology, the stolen desires are probably just a commodity. Accordingly, their loss doesn’t seem to matter to those who were robbed. Although some drag themselves through everyday life visibly depressed, most people don’t notice it at all. If Asha hadn’t set out to free them from their despot, they probably wouldn’t have even noticed their own exploitation.

Wish. Animation. USA 2023. Regie: Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn. 95 Min.