Wish

There is a magic kingdom, one where prospective inhabitants give up their dreaming in return for security. They may retain lesser wants and needs but they have exchanged their greatest wish for blanket safety, one knitted not from the wool over their eyes but a hollowness in their hearts. That's proper fabulous stuff, but what adds weird light to that sense of darkness is that it's being told by Disney.

Disney, celebrating a hundred years of film-making. Disney, the corporation whose assemblage of intellectual properties now gives them powers they've lobbied to strengthen again and again over the stuff that childhoods are made of. Disney, the capitalist entity with private territory, embassies from the imaginary with their own police forces and tax-raising powers. Disney, whose parks are places of pilgrimage. Disney, who have monetised and merchandised folk tales. Disney!

Though much like Magnifico (Chris Pine) their rise to power is made of well wishes. The road to Main Street is paved with good intentions. It's when they're examined by prospective sorceror's apprentice Asha (Ariana DeBose) that the motives start to look suspect. In an early duet they both sing about how they will "protect... at all costs," but though their voices are unified they don't mean the same thing.

One of the joys of being an elder sibling and an uncle is that you get to vicariously experience media you're already familiar with. I'm told that might be one of those you get with parenthood too but there's significantly less admin. Sometimes that's actual works, sometimes that's tone. I took my youngest sibling to see Mulan when first released and if memory serves for the tie-in Happy Meal, and my experience of the Frozen sequel was enhanced by it being an early cinema visit for my eldest nibling. They saw Wish before me, and their opinion was that it was "too dark." I only slightly disagree.

Magnifico's villainy has no doubt about it. Green tendrils are less given to untruth than 50% of guards in riddles. He might not be clad in Marvel purple or DC's Batman-adjacent black but as Dolores Umbridge proved evil comes in many colours and doesn't smell because it's got no nose. Even the best of intentions can lead one astray and that's without a book of unsavoury magic locked away from the sweetness elsewhere.

That darkness is leavened by Star. You might know their work already from that whole "When You Wish Upon A..." business. Again, that a fundamental element of this film is someone creating their own magic outwith the rigid structures of a hegemonic institution is fair enough, but that it's being told by Disney is a surprise. It's one of those whiplash ironies that goes with Boots Riley's incredible TV show I'm A Virgo being an Amazon production. That doesn't make either of them less worthy as entertainment, indeed it adds a frisson to both. Star is wished upon, and, accordingly, dreams come true.

Not without incident. Jennifer Lee who penned for Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph and Zootropolis, Allison Moore whose TV work includes Playstation series based on comic book Powers, and co-director Chris Buck have crafted a story that's as recursive and referential as it is respectful of Disney's history. It's like Skyfall with a talking goat. It's a début feature as director for Fawn Veerasunthorn. She's had important roles in animation before, and not all for Disney. Buck's career is more dear to Bambi's bosses including Tarzan. It's striking how few further adaptations there have been since that 1999 version. As best I can tell half of the half dozen are directly connected to it. It can't just be that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has given us a new Jane to pine after a wooden-headed hunk with an initial T, though now that we're on Thor Four one does wonder what Thor's for.

Nevertheless, or indeed Never-Never-Land-the-less, a wish given to Magnifico becomes theirs to control, to grant access to thereafter. He has to decide if it is 'safe', but the criteria used might not be the ones you'd think. There are dangers to letting power be used indiscriminately. As in Rogue One, you might have Alan Tudyk's sidekick stealing the show, though there's more than four feet of difference between K2-SO and Valentino. That's the goat, and I strongly suspect I'm going to acquire the inevitable Lego version of the latter to go with my Lego version of the former. That lens of merchandise is part of how Disney shapes the world, and if I had my druthers one of the recommendations I'd make for those seeing Wish would be to pick up some of the work of Baudrillard or Umberto Eco. By any other name the Kingdom of Rosas would smell as sweet, but the name of the rose can't itself hide corruption.

I'm aware of the irony of using Marvel and Star Wars to talk about a film which I'm also arguing is about control of imagination. I also know that I'm not talking about Wish as something other than an exercise in overinterpretation. I shall though, because I do think it really works at that level too. The songs are foot-tappers, Star is the adorable made manifest, and the cast embody the gorgeous animation with deeper life. Ariana DeBose has a fair set of pipes, demonstrated perhaps most widely most recently in West Side Story. Asha manages to get all the Disney princess milestones, from revels to rebellion, betrayal to bluebirds, and DeBose sings her heart out to give her heart. Chris Pine's a bit of a revelation. Any number of films have suffered from actors not used to voice-work over-egging or under-playing but he hits just the right notes throughout. I actually went back to check and beyond what are basically cameos in American Dad and Robot Chicken this might be his first such role, and it is knocked out of the park.

For reasons of production rivalry I won't claim this has universal appeal but it's a gold standard Disney animated film. Superfans will enjoy dozens of references scattered throughout, and starry versions of characters from Disney's long history in the credits could make a phenomenal holiday quiz round. Seeing it in the cinema I heard a voice behind me shout 'Stitch!' in recognition, but in a different crowd I know I'd have heard 'Basil!' (The Great Mouse Detective) and I've realised I got Jim Hawkins (Treasure Planet) and Milo Thatch (Atlantis: The Lost Empire) mixed up. I'd love to blame something other than misremembering which McDonald's toys with a steampunk aesthetic I have that relate to each but I shan't.

New fans will enjoy all the hallmarks of quality entertainment. There's the songs, the music by Dave Metzger, an animation style that leverages computing techniques to grade detail into background more smoothly than older methods. In other places there's glassware whose reflections and refractions are as much a stunt as that early digital circling of a chandelier in Beauty & The Beast. The character design is spot on, Star is a geometric wonder, somehow a sphere with angles that are all acute appearance. There's comic business in the background, an almost obligatory false moustache, and a good amount of people falling over.

It's also a film that invites reading, the kind of grist that those of us who love to mill things over find fine indeed. There's the political pointedness of its preservation of power but also it being an explicitly Mediterranean principality that'll accept incomers but at a price. There's even something in that some get their wish without having yet had their wish, the kind of space between the unrequited and the prophetic that fairy tales are made of. Wish feels like one granted, a treat from start to finish. I can but hope they'll leave it be, better having burned bright than being re-lit like a trick candle.