Unlike its classics, Disney’s latest offering leaves viewers wishing for more.

By Ann Sheehy

Disney’s latest movie, Wish, released last November; but for all the hype about 100 years of Disney, I thought it would be a lot better. Wish has a shallow story, forgettable songs, and a heroine who’s mostly unrelatable. It felt like the writers put more effort into references to other Disney films than into writing a good movie.

Wish opens with the classic storybook in a tower, while a narrator tells you about a kingdom, a king who’s also a magician, and a random disaster that’s never mentioned again. Then the movie fast forwards to a girl named Asha who has a job giving tours to prospective residents of the city. She sings a song about how people come and give their wishes to the king to keep them safe; then they forget about their wish until the king (whose name is Magnifico) decides to grant it. (Can you guess who the bad guy is yet?) Then Asha goes to a job interview with the king and sees all the wishes–which look like big soap bubbles but a little more solid–in his tower. Asha sees her grandfather’s wish and asks Magnifico to grant it, but he says that it’s too ambiguous and could be dangerous. So she goes out into the woods and makes a very ambiguous wish, so general that I barely remember what it was. But she must have wished it really hard, because at the end of her song a cartoon star comes down from the sky to help her grant her wish. Asha decides that they need to get everybody’s wishes back from Magnifico (who, by the way, wants to keep them). By the end of the movie, big surprise: Magnifico is defeated, they get the wishes back, and everyone lives happily ever after.

My biggest problem with Wish is that it is shallow. The storyline is simple–the evil king gets defeated and everyone is happy–but that isn’t the issue. Disney has made good movies with simple storylines, but all of those were about something more. Take Encanto, a recent Disney movie that (in my opinion) is a lot better than Wish. On the surface, it’s about a magic house in South America. But it’s also about family and loving each other even when you’re not perfect. Frozen is about a princess trying to unfreeze the kingdom, but it’s also about a girl who’s trying to figure out what love is. Wish doesn’t have anything like that–there’s nothing more to the movie than the simple storyline. It’s not about family, or feeling left out. It even fails to be about wishing because it completely separates the wishes from the people who made them.

Wish’s main character, Asha, is unrelatable. No one makes a movie where everything is perfect–that would be boring; so in a sense, all movies are about problems. And usually, the writer wants the problems to be relatable. They want the audience to understand what the characters are going through and sympathize with them. In Encanto, one of Mirabel’s problems is that her magic house is breaking. But that’s not her only problem. She feels left out in her family and doesn’t like her sister, and those are things that viewers can relate to. And because they can relate with Mirabel, they sympathize and care about her. In Wish, Asha’s problems aren’t relatable, and she doesn’t have that many of them. She loves her family and they love her; she’s happy with where she lives; she doesn’t have any major character flaws. She thinks Magnifico shouldn’t be king and she tries to overthrow him, and her only problem is that he doesn’t want to be overthrown. An evil king stealing wishes isn’t a problem that I will ever have, and it’s not one I can relate to. And because I couldn’t relate to Asha, I didn’t care that much about her.

Lastly, none of Wish’s songs were very good. To be sure, every musical has its less-than-memorable songs–sorry to the perfect flower-growing girl from Encanto, but no one gets her song stuck in their head. Bruno is the song they remember. Of course Wish has some flop songs, but it doesn’t have any good ones–or even catchy ones–to offset all the forgettable songs.

Overall, Wish could have been a lot better. The story is shallow, the heroine is unrelatable, and the songs are forgettable. In 100 years Disney has made many good movies, but Wish just wasn’t one of them.