It’s become a crutch for critics to say that this or that movie is so generic that it must have been generated by AI. I’ve resisted, but I’m finally going to play that card in regard to Wish. Thanks to a banal familiarity mixed with a dose of inhuman idiosyncrasy, the movie feels as if someone fed the opening Disney logo sequence — of fireworks bursting over a fairytale castle — to an AI program and asked it to spit out a 95-minute animated musical in the mode of the studio’s classics. Wish would be instantly forgettable if it weren’t for the bizarre story choices that can only be described as autopopulated hiccups. In the island city-state of Rosas, a teen named Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose) — who is defined only by her love for her aged grandfather — interviews for a prestigious position as assistant to Magnifico (Chris Pine), Rosas’ founder. As I understand it from the convoluted storybook preamble, Magnifico failed to achieve his own ambitions as a young man, so he taught himself to become a sorcerer instead, then established Rosas as a place for all who have been unable to achieve their dreams. Upon arrival, newcomers must whisper their deepest wish to Magnifico, who will then keep them “protected” in glowing orbs in his castle, occasionally granting the wishes in ceremonies for the select few. I’m sure this all seems logical to ChatGPT, but my head was spinning, even as every story beat seemed garden-variety Disney. (The tension comes when Asha discovers that Magnifico’s intentions might not be beneficent.) If Wish disappoints on a story level, it also does in those other crucial Disney categories: a supposedly show-stopping number involving those orbs is actually limited in its visual expanse and imagination, while the music is either strangely aggressive or benignly balladic, with lyrics that only vaguely match the situation at hand. When our daughters were young, we took them on a trip to Walt Disney World, where the family running joke was that we weren’t allowed to use a sentence in the park that didn’t involve the words “wish,” “hope,” or “dreams,” lest the Disney police arrest us. Little did I know that some 12 years later, our cynicism would be turned into a Disney animated musical called Wish.
(5/26/2024)
