Wish is the most soulless corporate “creation” I’ve seen in a very long time.

It’s very cool to have a traditional Disney lead be an unambiguously black woman. This is a legitimately great move and considering how this film is being positioned in the canon of classical Disney, that’s a pretty massive move. It’s cool that the art style attempts to be a hybrid between the classical 2D and modern 3D styles. And it’s cool that the movie has some parts where it’s about anti-fascism and resistance movements. That might be me looking too deep into the movie, and maybe I am, but it absolutely directly invites this kind of analysis in brief moments. But that’s about all I have positive to say.

Disney turned 100 years old this year and, while I’m unsure of the actual production pipeline of this film, it feels like Wish was created primarily to celebrate a century of the brand. Being a unique movie with interesting ideas was not only secondary but seemingly not even a goal for this project at all.

The story is incredibly generic. We’ve seen corrupt kings, accidentally magical protagonists, and talking animal sidekicks in a million of these movies, but Wish does absolutely nothing to subvert these and many other tropes. Plus, with this being a musical, the songs often have overly wordy, awkward lyrics. This makes any attempt at a catchy hook fall flat on its face, so almost none of the songs slap at all.

Then on top of that, so many elements of the movie seemed to be there only to celebrate the brand. The fact that one of the main side characters is turning 100 as the film starts and has a dream eerily similar to what Walt himself dreamed of doing with his company is the most cynical reference they could possibly make. And that character stand-in is made even more annoying with the final after-credits scene of the film, which is yet another attempt to connect this film to the wider Disney brand. But worse than that are the even less subtle references to other Disney IP sprinkled throughout the film. These are all too connected to this world and story to feel like Easter eggs, but they’re all too directly referential to feel like it’s a part of this world.

It leaves me feeling that these moments are attempts to tie this and every other Disney film together into one connected world, and that is truly the biggest grievance of the film. By doing this, it lessens those other projects in some corrupting, barely tangible way. It’s like how Black Panther is an incredible movie about survivor’s guilt and the pressure to use your privilege wisely, but many of its themes are thrown out once those characters have to fight aliens in a world-ending battle weeks later. You can even see some MCU movies bitterly grapple with this very problem, like how Guardians of the Galaxy 3 treats the events that happened to Gamora in Endgame and Infinity War with disdain. Wish being an origin story for the rest of Disney’s IP corrupts those original projects so much that it is easier to simply not accept it as canon to those films. But that makes everything fall apart because, without this, Wish has nothing original or interesting to stand on.

Wish is the kind of film made to see in 4D while at Disney Land itself. It’s the type of movie meant for someone who paid for a ticket, took the days off, drove down and walked all this way, and is very, very ready to drink the Kool-Aid. But I don’t have that incentivize to try to enjoy this movie. Hell, I don’t even have that much nostalgia for classic Disney. But in today’s world, where corporations are so incredibly easy to vilify (because they are villains of course), it’s hard to accept a movie like this as anything but corporate propaganda. It just sucks that the few very few good and progressive ideas are suffocated by the bad in this film. That’s the legacy that should define the next century of Disney, not the same tired old crap.

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