Wish landed with all the enthusiasm of an audience that did not enjoy the 2022 Disney entry Strange World. There was too much weight on this film being a part of Disney’s 100 years celebration. It was supposed to somehow represent the totality of everything that came after Walt first conceived the mouse that would go on to launch an empire. Somehow, Wish would bring in the audiences who loved early Disney animation like Snow White and The Seven Dwarves, the middle years with 101 Dalmatians, the dark times of The Black Cauldron, the renaissance of The Lion King, the rocky 2000’s where they mostly deferred to Pixar, and then back to more recently with fare like Frozen and Moana. how? Never. It never was going to do that. The task is too high.
Personally, if I worked for Disney, the best way to celebrate 100 years is to celebrate how you got here. That road always ran through Mickey, and either coming up with a feature for him and his friends, doing a feature length Steamboat Willie, or adapting one of the exceptional video games made like Epic Mickey or Kingdom Hearts would have felt far more full circle than Wish. Wish just feels like it could have opened in any era, and been just as average as it is.
I can understand how this referential representation of the physical manifestation of wishes seemed like the perfect fit, since Disney has put so much focus on Wishes over the years. From naming a cruise ship, to fireworks shows, to making sure that word appears in Disney songs, we know that a dream is a wish your heart makes, but also you have to wish upon a star.
We start off in a world that is pretty generic, and are given a fairly typical Disney lead (voiced by Ariana DeBose), who dreams of one day working for a King Wizard (he’s both a king, and a wizard, and voiced by Chris Pine), who has these wish granting ceremonies. People in her town give this guy their wishes, and he extracts them (which reminded me of how Dumbledore stores his memories) and they are relieved of the weight of that wish, and then in a special ceremony held once a year, he picks a wish and grants it. But, soon our heroine finds out that not all wishes are granted, and there’s some nefarious plot here to hoarde ungranted wishes.
then, she meets a mischievous star that helps her on her journey to prove to her family and her village that their leader is evil, and find a way to grant some wishes. This happens against a backdrop of Easter eggs of Disney movies. This was probably the one part of the audio description that disappointed me the most, as Disney has chosen this route before. With Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers, they chose to hide most of the cameos, and there were many where a character was described, where you could have told the audience who it was. That movie was full of cameos for the sighted audience, and not for the blind one. Here, Wish features a little of the same, with some visual references to Disney films past, but Disney likely once again held Deluxe and narrator Michelle Deco to unrealistic goals that don’t bridge the gap between the sighted audience and the sighted audience.
this is interesting, because much like Rescue Rangers, it was something that became more and more aware after I experienced the film, started having conversations with sighted people, and really paid attention to what others were breaking down online. I noticed, much like I did with Rescue rangers, there are references we miss out on, which really does bring down the experience. i think they thought their film was special on its own, but the film was conceived as this 100 year celebration of everything Disney, so just giving me the basic story isn’t the whole point, is it?
The fact is that Wish is not interesting enough on its own to sustain, and needs the references. The characters are generic and underdeveloped, I can’t remember a single song from this movie, and I haven’t heard anyone trying to sing one. there’s no We Don’t Talk About bruno here, there’s just a lot of forgettable music. Really, what this film is, is a visual celebration of the animators at Disney, because the story itself is lacking and predictable. The hero always wins, it’s a Disney film. And to make it worse, it feels like it telegraphs to you how she will win, as you see things playing out in a very obvious and traditional fashion.
Ultimately, I grow more and more disappointed by this film as time goes by. I have conversations with people who got some Easter egg-ish reference, and I didn’t. I don’t blame Deluxe, I blame Disney. They have some of the weirdest and most restrictive contracts when it comes to creating audio description. The only films that come out on top are films that typically just so happen to be easy to describe in the first place. It seems like there’s someone at Disney who gets to say “don’t tell the blind people that”, before letting the audio description company they hire, professionals actually trained in conveying this experience to the audience, who understand that the idea is that if a family sits down and watches Wish together, and one member of the family is blind or low vision, they can have as close to the same experience as the rest of their family at the same time. Despite what Hollywood may believe by constantly treating us like a niche audience, this niche audience frequently does things like watch movies with sighted people, who only get frustrated at our sub par accessibility, or lack thereof. They aren’t just making a poor representation of their product to home bound hermits with no friends, family, or internet, but rather people who are parts of the community. Now, my community knows that Disney produced audio description for Wish, that much like Rescue Rangers, did not understand what about it made it special. some executive who gets paid six figures sat down and wrote out a contractual agreement of what to include and not include and never stopped to ask if that would put the target demo at a disadvantage.
You might kind of enjoy Wish if you are a self-described homebound hermit who knows no one, and doesn’t go on the internet. but then again, you are here now, so I think you can probably find a breakdown of all the Disney references like I can. In the spirit of Wish, I’ll make one. I wish people would understand just how important and significant it is to have quality audio description that is immersive and representational in the best possible way of the given product, and makes no effort to hide elements from the blind audience, nor is it produced at a budget, because of some belief that cheap accessibility is still accessibility. I don’t remember getting a blind discount to your streaming service, and since my money is as good as everyone else’s, my access should be as well.
Final Grade: B-
