Throw caution to every warning sign
Wish, the 62nd animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation studios, was very consciously, one might even say laboriously conceived to be the big capstone to the Disney 100 celebrations, in which the Walt Disney Company celebrates the anniversary of its incorporation, as Disney Brothers Studio, on 16 October 1923. Given that 2023 turned out to be something of an all-hands-on-deck catastrophe * for the company, Wish has perhaps ended up serving as the ideal capstone to that anniversary year in a way it wasn't supposed to. Because goodness gracious, does it ever fucking suck. The thing about bad Disney movies is that they tend to have various stopgaps in place so they can only fail so much: the animation is bad but the songs are good; the story is weak but the backgrounds are pretty; the jokes don't land but the action-adventure sequences do. Wish has had the profound misfortune to fail on all of these fronts at once: the animation is ugly, the story is confusing, the characters are an unappealing jumble of badly-expressed traits, the voice acting is meager, the songs are an affront to God. Seriously, the songs here are just the worst and when I say "the worst" in italics, that's not me using that phrase in a slangy, informal way, I mean that the songs are the actual literal worst ones in 62 feature films, the substantial majority of which have been musicals, over the course of 86 years. I feel like I could write this entire review about how much I hate the songs. But that would shortchange how much I hate the rest of the film, and I would not like to do that.
Before anything else, though, some positivity: I like the idea behind the visual aesthetic. I don't think the execution got there. But the idea is good: if the point is that we're celebrating 100 years of Disney animation, let's try to celebrate 100 years of Disney animation, and not just the 13 years of Disney animation since we got really good at using computers with Tangled in 2010. In practice, this means that the animation staff has discovered cel shading, a technique that has been used to make CGI look sort of like hand-painted 2-D animation for over 20 years at this point: it's a way of texturing and lighting a 3-D model so that the telltale signs of depth and dimensionality (e.g. shadows) don't really show up, so it looks sort of flat, but it can still be manipulated in three-dimensional space. A best-of-both-worlds situation, is the idea, and as such a good fit for a film whose primary goal is to being precisely that, a tribute to two different media that are lumped together under the broad word "animation". What Wish is up to isn't precisely "cel shading", but it's a similar enough principle, and the animators in this case have added a fun little wrinkle, using some kind of software trick to surround the characters in thick colored outlines that don't move in 3-D space, so no matter what angle you're looking at, it looks like they have an outline around them. So it's something. And the background artists have gotten even closer to the target, painting and lighting the models for the environments so that the don't merely look flat, they look like they're watercolor paintings on slightly textured paper.
It's nice to see Disney trying to do an actual aesthetic, something the studio has been oddly averse to; they have an unmistakable house style that favors pretty straightforward realism in the lighting, the texture of backgrounds, and the movement of clothing, and their character designs have a slightly more "cartoon" feeling, with big-eyed faces obviously descended from the studio's '90s house style, when it was still making 2-D films, and skin that's a bit unpleasantly flawless, more like porcelain or vinyl dolls than anything with organic flexibility and translucency and detail. Wish is the most that any of the studio's films has tried to move outside of that since it was pinned down, and it's nice to see them trying. I don't know that they succeeded, but they tried. Neither the flat backgrounds nor the thick outlines are actually kept up with 100% of the time, which I suspect is a sign that they had to rush to get this finished up in time for its 100-year obligations, so the style isn't consistent. And while they've put effort into hiding the characters' 3-D origins in terms of how they look, how they move is still janky in the way that Disney's character animation has tended to be janky ever since Frozen proved that it's possible to make enormous tidal waves of money even if the whole cast feels like tin men in search of their oil can. I've never entirely figured out why Disney's CGI character animation feels so disquietingly ugly; my wouldn't-want-to-commit-to-it-in-public assumption has been that they don't have enough interconnected control points on the character armatures, so there's not enough secondary movement built-in, but there's definitely something that makes all of the movement look glassy and impersonal. That's irksome enough in the Frozen films and Raya and the Last Dragon (the three movies where it has been the most distracting, I think), but the layer of stylisation in Wish makes it look much worse, perhaps for no greater reason than that it's calling attention to it.
But anyway: they wanted Wish to look neat, and I like that. It feels pretty obvious that, like every other studio, Disney was caught flat-footed by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, with its basically unprecedented demonstration of how much you could evoke of hand-drawn 2-D art in animation fully exploiting all of the possibilities of 3-D computer animation, and wanted some of that energy for itself, but that impulse has led to some very cool work in the last couple of years. Unfortunately for Disney, one specific example of that cool work was DreamWorks Animation's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which premiered about 11 months before Wish, does a lot of the same things stylistically, does all of them better, and does more things on top of them. All of this inevitably makes the second film out look redundant if not indeed derivative (frankly, Wish would be so lucky as to look more derivative of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish), which does hurt Wish more than it deserve to be hurt. I pity Disney. There was no predicting that was going to happen. There was certainly no predicting that it was going to happen in the form of another movie with "Wish" in the title. But history is unfair sometimes.
Anyways, so much for the half-formed look of the thing, which I'll remind you, I said was my positive thing about the movie. Beyond that, this is a pretty grim experience, made bearable mostly in that it's a pretty fast-moving 95 minutes, in part because it has so many musical breaks. The homages to Disney history start right away with a title sequence based on the one in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that segues into a storybook opening that evokes the one from Sleeping Beauty - pro tip: making the viewer start thinking about two of the very best animated features in the history of the industry even before they have a chance to start thinking about this movie is probably never a good call - which gets up to speed on the history of the island kingdom of Rosas, somewhere off the coast of Spain (it's my problem, not the film's, but I find it bizarre and immediately off-putting that the film has made a point of placing its fantastical neverland fairy kingdom in a specific locale on the actual planet Earth). Here, the wizard king Magnifico (Chris Pine) and his wife Amaya (Angelique Cabral) have created a small but tight-knit community built around the king's omnipotent wish-granting magic: every citizen, on their 18th birthday, makes one deep, true, abiding wish that speaks to their deepest desire (these are all bullshitty things like "flying" or "playing guitar", not normal people things like "a nicer house" or "a big dick", let along things like "untold wealth", "a kingdom of my own", or "immortality"), which is then excised from their memory, and they no longer dream of wanting that thing. These wishes are transformed into crystal balls that Magnifico keeps in his castle keep, and once per month, he grants one wish.
If you got that far without having at least some rather confused questions, if not outright objections, you're closer to being the target audience for Wish than I am. You need to be, too, because the film assumes that we're all onboard with this scenario, these somewhat idiosyncratic metaphysics around what it means to "wish", and the notion that you could tell an entire city full of people "you can sacrifice your conscious knowledge of the thing you most passionately want, in the process carving out a part of your personality that everyone else will recognise is missing, for a less than 1% chance that it will come to pass" and they will all think that sounds like a terrific deal. The actual story involves one 17-year-old named Asha (Ariana DeBose) who is hoping to be made Magnifico's assistant, and during the interview she is invited to see his cache of wish-globes - the first time ever that he's done this, apparently, since the assortment of undeveloped notions passing for a "story" by Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck & Fawn Veerasunthorn & Allison Moore has really just not the smallest interest in making sense or being even a little bit plausible for even one goddamn scene - at which point she discovers that he's an autocrat who chooses by his own whim which wishes to grant, despite that being the thing we already knew because she had already told us. "Most of these wishes will never be granted" she gasps in deepest horror. No fucking shit you unbelievable idiot, that is literally the concept on which your society was founded. I have never wanted the protagonist of a Disney film to lose just on principle more than this, outside of maybe Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Anyway, Asha flees and that night she wishes on a star for something awfully vague; "it would be nice if everything would be nice" is the sense of it, I think. This wish is so powerful that it actually pulls the Wishing Star down from the sky, where it becomes a roly-poly little smiley face with a tiny body attached, which depending on your level of cynicism is either a powerfully shameless rip-off of the Lumas from the video game Super Mario Galaxy (as already seen in a 2023 animated film, courtesy of The Super Mario Bros. Movie) or simply a design that started as a plush toy that could be readily marketed and backed its way into an animated character model from there; depending on your level of credulity, it's also based on Snow White concept art that doesn't really look much at all like the final version. The incorporation of the Wishing Star creates such a rupture in the magical atmosphere over Rosas that Magnifico immediately recognises a threat to his power. "But who could it be?" he wonders from his tower? Dunno, maybe the one and only person you've ever shown your inner sanctum, whose response was to say "you are a great evil monster" before turning and running in terror, you great cloth-brained twat? Credit to the movie, it found a way to make a villain who's just as much of an unforgivable moron as its protagonist. They're a nicely-matched set.
Anyway, lots of drab stuff proceeds: talking animals, skybeam battles, all that good stuff. There is very little direction to any of it, and nothing much at all that so much as slows Asha down in her quest to reveal to the populace that Magnifico is a very bad man because he does exactly the things he claims to do, in public, at least twelve times every year. By the time it's over, this has all become a metaphor for the Walt Disney Company itself, the granters of all wishes to all good people, and this is galling and offensive, though not nearly as much as it's confusing: so who is Magnifico in this scenario: Walt Disney himself? DreamWorks? The Fleischer brothers? Live-action cinema? Part of me wants him to be Charles Mintz and this is all a myth about Disney losing the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1928? Because that seems like a deep cut.
Whatever it's "about", it takes an unsatisfactory and perfunctory route to get there, with no compelling characters and only one good vocal performance, from Pine, who's having a good enough time doing the "unctuous egotist baddie" routine. The film's comic relief is viciously bad, partially around Asha's seven friends with personalities and color-coded costumes based on the Seven Dwarfs (for a movie that's nominally about the entire history of the studio and all of its animated features, it's kind of weird how limited Wish's reference pool is: Snow White and Pinocchio account for about 95% of the references and Easter eggs, and even Pinocchio is really only there to supply "When You Wish Upon a Star", which keeps making pseudo-cameos in Dave Metzger's score), but mostly around the talking goat Valentino (Alan Tudyk) who just keeps spewing out random, useless quips in a "funny" deep British accent, and achieves the miraculous, I would have even said impossible feat of being a talking animal sidekick in a Disney animated feature that I hated more than Mushu from Mulan.
Anyway, it's boring and pointless and while it's not "confusing", it takes way more effort to make sense of it than the filmmakers obviously anticipate, and I would already greatly dislike it for all of these reasons. I hate it, and have with fiery glee shoved it down to the bottom rungs of my ranking of those 62 features, however, mostly because of the songs. They are terrible. There's only one that's even sort of okay, the villain song "This Is the Thanks I Get?!", and this is more because it is largely deficient of the problems present in the rest. Largely. Not entirely. The other five songs (plus one reprise) are a litany of horrors, with the worst offender being "I'm a Star", in which lyricist Julia Michaels (co-writing the anonymous poppy music with Benjamin Rice - who achieves another impossible feat, that of being my least-favorite Rice to have contributed to the songs in a Disney movie) tries to put over some kind of utterly bonkers materialist spirituality in which, because we are (as Joni Mitchell once said) stardust, we are all functionally the same as stars, which means we can wish on ourselves. And this isn't an odd musical caprice, it ends up setting up the third act. But setting aside the film's perplexing cosmology and moral system, the song is just a nightmare, musically and lyrically. Musically, it's the most dysfuntional of Michaels & Rice's bad impressions of Lin-Manuel Miranda (which is the only trick they know), notably in the many times when the song's title is sung, and it results in an ungainly pileup of pauses leading into a frantic rush to fit too many syllables into too few notes. Lyrically, if I were to write down every horrendous sentence Michaels tries to put over, I would merely end up transcribing the entire song. So I will limit myself to four particularly horrible missteps:
"Do you know you're a work of art? / Even in the deepest dark / If you really wanna know just who you are / I'm a star!" - The song has a general problem with rhyming words with "star" that actually rhyme with "star", or with each other, but this is the most clunky-sounding example.
"We are our own origin story" - Okay, just try to fucking say that. You notice how you have to kind of cough out four consecutive syllables that start with a vowel, three of them leading directly into a liquid consonant? Notice how you can't really do it? Now imagine that you have to sing it. Just hideous. This exact line shows up in the song twice.
"[Have you ever wondered] why our eyes all look like microscopic galaxies?" - No. Nobody has ever wondered that. That's not a thing. Shut the fuck up.
And then the whopper of whoppers, maybe the literal worst couplet in the history of Disney filmmaking, "When it comes to the universe we're all shareholders / Get that through your system. (Solar!)". The parenthetical "solar!" is sung by a bunny who jumps up into the frame just for the purpose of that interjection.
There are, to be clear, bad lyrics, bad musics, and cumbersome storytelling all throughout the songs here. The big "I Want" song, "This Wish", includes the mind-melting "So I look up at the stars to guide me / And throw caution to every warning sign", which is kind of precisely the opposite of a sentence that a native speaker of English, familiar with English idioms, should be capable of writing. So it's all pretty dreadful and dispiriting, and then these songs have been laid out into the film and there's just... no staging. "I'm a Star" kind of has the singing animal chorus, and they move around a lot, and "This Is the Thanks I Get?!" has bright green lighting, and that's about it. "This Wish" is so bland to look at that it actively harms the emotions the moment is trying to gin up: Asha walks up a hill at night, and then looks up at the sky in an extreme wide shot. And "walks up a hill during the 'I Want' song" isn't even uncharted territory for Disney animation! One of the richest moments in Beauty and the Beast is a "walk up the hill" scene! But here, it just plops out with a flat little squish, just one more dead-eyed moment in a film full of them, blandly-little staged bits of nothing, free of inspiration, of beauty of any life at all.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*Meaning, in this case, that out of Disney's eight theatrical feature films in 2023, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only one to have unambiguously turned a good profit, while Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Little Mermaid, and Elemental have all managed to break even, more or less. Meanwhile, fully half of the company's releases this year - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Haunted Mansion, The Marvels, and Wish itself - are all jockeying for spots on the list of the biggest financial bombs in cinema history, and The Marvels stands to be literally the #1 film on that list.
Before anything else, though, some positivity: I like the idea behind the visual aesthetic. I don't think the execution got there. But the idea is good: if the point is that we're celebrating 100 years of Disney animation, let's try to celebrate 100 years of Disney animation, and not just the 13 years of Disney animation since we got really good at using computers with Tangled in 2010. In practice, this means that the animation staff has discovered cel shading, a technique that has been used to make CGI look sort of like hand-painted 2-D animation for over 20 years at this point: it's a way of texturing and lighting a 3-D model so that the telltale signs of depth and dimensionality (e.g. shadows) don't really show up, so it looks sort of flat, but it can still be manipulated in three-dimensional space. A best-of-both-worlds situation, is the idea, and as such a good fit for a film whose primary goal is to being precisely that, a tribute to two different media that are lumped together under the broad word "animation". What Wish is up to isn't precisely "cel shading", but it's a similar enough principle, and the animators in this case have added a fun little wrinkle, using some kind of software trick to surround the characters in thick colored outlines that don't move in 3-D space, so no matter what angle you're looking at, it looks like they have an outline around them. So it's something. And the background artists have gotten even closer to the target, painting and lighting the models for the environments so that the don't merely look flat, they look like they're watercolor paintings on slightly textured paper.
It's nice to see Disney trying to do an actual aesthetic, something the studio has been oddly averse to; they have an unmistakable house style that favors pretty straightforward realism in the lighting, the texture of backgrounds, and the movement of clothing, and their character designs have a slightly more "cartoon" feeling, with big-eyed faces obviously descended from the studio's '90s house style, when it was still making 2-D films, and skin that's a bit unpleasantly flawless, more like porcelain or vinyl dolls than anything with organic flexibility and translucency and detail. Wish is the most that any of the studio's films has tried to move outside of that since it was pinned down, and it's nice to see them trying. I don't know that they succeeded, but they tried. Neither the flat backgrounds nor the thick outlines are actually kept up with 100% of the time, which I suspect is a sign that they had to rush to get this finished up in time for its 100-year obligations, so the style isn't consistent. And while they've put effort into hiding the characters' 3-D origins in terms of how they look, how they move is still janky in the way that Disney's character animation has tended to be janky ever since Frozen proved that it's possible to make enormous tidal waves of money even if the whole cast feels like tin men in search of their oil can. I've never entirely figured out why Disney's CGI character animation feels so disquietingly ugly; my wouldn't-want-to-commit-to-it-in-public assumption has been that they don't have enough interconnected control points on the character armatures, so there's not enough secondary movement built-in, but there's definitely something that makes all of the movement look glassy and impersonal. That's irksome enough in the Frozen films and Raya and the Last Dragon (the three movies where it has been the most distracting, I think), but the layer of stylisation in Wish makes it look much worse, perhaps for no greater reason than that it's calling attention to it.
But anyway: they wanted Wish to look neat, and I like that. It feels pretty obvious that, like every other studio, Disney was caught flat-footed by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, with its basically unprecedented demonstration of how much you could evoke of hand-drawn 2-D art in animation fully exploiting all of the possibilities of 3-D computer animation, and wanted some of that energy for itself, but that impulse has led to some very cool work in the last couple of years. Unfortunately for Disney, one specific example of that cool work was DreamWorks Animation's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which premiered about 11 months before Wish, does a lot of the same things stylistically, does all of them better, and does more things on top of them. All of this inevitably makes the second film out look redundant if not indeed derivative (frankly, Wish would be so lucky as to look more derivative of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish), which does hurt Wish more than it deserve to be hurt. I pity Disney. There was no predicting that was going to happen. There was certainly no predicting that it was going to happen in the form of another movie with "Wish" in the title. But history is unfair sometimes.
Anyways, so much for the half-formed look of the thing, which I'll remind you, I said was my positive thing about the movie. Beyond that, this is a pretty grim experience, made bearable mostly in that it's a pretty fast-moving 95 minutes, in part because it has so many musical breaks. The homages to Disney history start right away with a title sequence based on the one in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that segues into a storybook opening that evokes the one from Sleeping Beauty - pro tip: making the viewer start thinking about two of the very best animated features in the history of the industry even before they have a chance to start thinking about this movie is probably never a good call - which gets up to speed on the history of the island kingdom of Rosas, somewhere off the coast of Spain (it's my problem, not the film's, but I find it bizarre and immediately off-putting that the film has made a point of placing its fantastical neverland fairy kingdom in a specific locale on the actual planet Earth). Here, the wizard king Magnifico (Chris Pine) and his wife Amaya (Angelique Cabral) have created a small but tight-knit community built around the king's omnipotent wish-granting magic: every citizen, on their 18th birthday, makes one deep, true, abiding wish that speaks to their deepest desire (these are all bullshitty things like "flying" or "playing guitar", not normal people things like "a nicer house" or "a big dick", let along things like "untold wealth", "a kingdom of my own", or "immortality"), which is then excised from their memory, and they no longer dream of wanting that thing. These wishes are transformed into crystal balls that Magnifico keeps in his castle keep, and once per month, he grants one wish.
If you got that far without having at least some rather confused questions, if not outright objections, you're closer to being the target audience for Wish than I am. You need to be, too, because the film assumes that we're all onboard with this scenario, these somewhat idiosyncratic metaphysics around what it means to "wish", and the notion that you could tell an entire city full of people "you can sacrifice your conscious knowledge of the thing you most passionately want, in the process carving out a part of your personality that everyone else will recognise is missing, for a less than 1% chance that it will come to pass" and they will all think that sounds like a terrific deal. The actual story involves one 17-year-old named Asha (Ariana DeBose) who is hoping to be made Magnifico's assistant, and during the interview she is invited to see his cache of wish-globes - the first time ever that he's done this, apparently, since the assortment of undeveloped notions passing for a "story" by Jennifer Lee & Chris Buck & Fawn Veerasunthorn & Allison Moore has really just not the smallest interest in making sense or being even a little bit plausible for even one goddamn scene - at which point she discovers that he's an autocrat who chooses by his own whim which wishes to grant, despite that being the thing we already knew because she had already told us. "Most of these wishes will never be granted" she gasps in deepest horror. No fucking shit you unbelievable idiot, that is literally the concept on which your society was founded. I have never wanted the protagonist of a Disney film to lose just on principle more than this, outside of maybe Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Anyway, Asha flees and that night she wishes on a star for something awfully vague; "it would be nice if everything would be nice" is the sense of it, I think. This wish is so powerful that it actually pulls the Wishing Star down from the sky, where it becomes a roly-poly little smiley face with a tiny body attached, which depending on your level of cynicism is either a powerfully shameless rip-off of the Lumas from the video game Super Mario Galaxy (as already seen in a 2023 animated film, courtesy of The Super Mario Bros. Movie) or simply a design that started as a plush toy that could be readily marketed and backed its way into an animated character model from there; depending on your level of credulity, it's also based on Snow White concept art that doesn't really look much at all like the final version. The incorporation of the Wishing Star creates such a rupture in the magical atmosphere over Rosas that Magnifico immediately recognises a threat to his power. "But who could it be?" he wonders from his tower? Dunno, maybe the one and only person you've ever shown your inner sanctum, whose response was to say "you are a great evil monster" before turning and running in terror, you great cloth-brained twat? Credit to the movie, it found a way to make a villain who's just as much of an unforgivable moron as its protagonist. They're a nicely-matched set.
Anyway, lots of drab stuff proceeds: talking animals, skybeam battles, all that good stuff. There is very little direction to any of it, and nothing much at all that so much as slows Asha down in her quest to reveal to the populace that Magnifico is a very bad man because he does exactly the things he claims to do, in public, at least twelve times every year. By the time it's over, this has all become a metaphor for the Walt Disney Company itself, the granters of all wishes to all good people, and this is galling and offensive, though not nearly as much as it's confusing: so who is Magnifico in this scenario: Walt Disney himself? DreamWorks? The Fleischer brothers? Live-action cinema? Part of me wants him to be Charles Mintz and this is all a myth about Disney losing the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1928? Because that seems like a deep cut.
Whatever it's "about", it takes an unsatisfactory and perfunctory route to get there, with no compelling characters and only one good vocal performance, from Pine, who's having a good enough time doing the "unctuous egotist baddie" routine. The film's comic relief is viciously bad, partially around Asha's seven friends with personalities and color-coded costumes based on the Seven Dwarfs (for a movie that's nominally about the entire history of the studio and all of its animated features, it's kind of weird how limited Wish's reference pool is: Snow White and Pinocchio account for about 95% of the references and Easter eggs, and even Pinocchio is really only there to supply "When You Wish Upon a Star", which keeps making pseudo-cameos in Dave Metzger's score), but mostly around the talking goat Valentino (Alan Tudyk) who just keeps spewing out random, useless quips in a "funny" deep British accent, and achieves the miraculous, I would have even said impossible feat of being a talking animal sidekick in a Disney animated feature that I hated more than Mushu from Mulan.
Anyway, it's boring and pointless and while it's not "confusing", it takes way more effort to make sense of it than the filmmakers obviously anticipate, and I would already greatly dislike it for all of these reasons. I hate it, and have with fiery glee shoved it down to the bottom rungs of my ranking of those 62 features, however, mostly because of the songs. They are terrible. There's only one that's even sort of okay, the villain song "This Is the Thanks I Get?!", and this is more because it is largely deficient of the problems present in the rest. Largely. Not entirely. The other five songs (plus one reprise) are a litany of horrors, with the worst offender being "I'm a Star", in which lyricist Julia Michaels (co-writing the anonymous poppy music with Benjamin Rice - who achieves another impossible feat, that of being my least-favorite Rice to have contributed to the songs in a Disney movie) tries to put over some kind of utterly bonkers materialist spirituality in which, because we are (as Joni Mitchell once said) stardust, we are all functionally the same as stars, which means we can wish on ourselves. And this isn't an odd musical caprice, it ends up setting up the third act. But setting aside the film's perplexing cosmology and moral system, the song is just a nightmare, musically and lyrically. Musically, it's the most dysfuntional of Michaels & Rice's bad impressions of Lin-Manuel Miranda (which is the only trick they know), notably in the many times when the song's title is sung, and it results in an ungainly pileup of pauses leading into a frantic rush to fit too many syllables into too few notes. Lyrically, if I were to write down every horrendous sentence Michaels tries to put over, I would merely end up transcribing the entire song. So I will limit myself to four particularly horrible missteps:
"Do you know you're a work of art? / Even in the deepest dark / If you really wanna know just who you are / I'm a star!" - The song has a general problem with rhyming words with "star" that actually rhyme with "star", or with each other, but this is the most clunky-sounding example.
"We are our own origin story" - Okay, just try to fucking say that. You notice how you have to kind of cough out four consecutive syllables that start with a vowel, three of them leading directly into a liquid consonant? Notice how you can't really do it? Now imagine that you have to sing it. Just hideous. This exact line shows up in the song twice.
"[Have you ever wondered] why our eyes all look like microscopic galaxies?" - No. Nobody has ever wondered that. That's not a thing. Shut the fuck up.
And then the whopper of whoppers, maybe the literal worst couplet in the history of Disney filmmaking, "When it comes to the universe we're all shareholders / Get that through your system. (Solar!)". The parenthetical "solar!" is sung by a bunny who jumps up into the frame just for the purpose of that interjection.
There are, to be clear, bad lyrics, bad musics, and cumbersome storytelling all throughout the songs here. The big "I Want" song, "This Wish", includes the mind-melting "So I look up at the stars to guide me / And throw caution to every warning sign", which is kind of precisely the opposite of a sentence that a native speaker of English, familiar with English idioms, should be capable of writing. So it's all pretty dreadful and dispiriting, and then these songs have been laid out into the film and there's just... no staging. "I'm a Star" kind of has the singing animal chorus, and they move around a lot, and "This Is the Thanks I Get?!" has bright green lighting, and that's about it. "This Wish" is so bland to look at that it actively harms the emotions the moment is trying to gin up: Asha walks up a hill at night, and then looks up at the sky in an extreme wide shot. And "walks up a hill during the 'I Want' song" isn't even uncharted territory for Disney animation! One of the richest moments in Beauty and the Beast is a "walk up the hill" scene! But here, it just plops out with a flat little squish, just one more dead-eyed moment in a film full of them, blandly-little staged bits of nothing, free of inspiration, of beauty of any life at all.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
*Meaning, in this case, that out of Disney's eight theatrical feature films in 2023, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only one to have unambiguously turned a good profit, while Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Little Mermaid, and Elemental have all managed to break even, more or less. Meanwhile, fully half of the company's releases this year - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Haunted Mansion, The Marvels, and Wish itself - are all jockeying for spots on the list of the biggest financial bombs in cinema history, and The Marvels stands to be literally the #1 film on that list.
