Wish, as in “I WISH I hadn’t seen this” or “I WISH they had tried harder?” As the keeper of a tiny tyrant, I have been anticipating this film for months. The strategy since June has been:
- Only watch movies at movie theaters while slowly becoming less and less concerned that the monster will choke on popcorn as she crams it down her throat for the entirety of the trip.
- Never rewatch anything. Movies are like burner phones for your imagination.
- Infinite playthroughs of the soundtrack afterwards.
And that’s… kinda it. The actors’ strike made the situation pretty dire, because although our local theaters were showing a new Disney movie every week in celebration of the 100th anniversary and also clearly as a means of filling the schedule as the fall roster dried up, not everything fit into the monster’s nap schedule, and only so many animated musicals are catchy enough to add to the bare list of songs that she’ll bark as requests/commands at 8 AM each morning. So, we’ve been listening to the soundtrack for weeks, especially the villain’s “This is the Thanks I Get?” with Chris Pine on vocals.
For two whole weeks whenever I put this song on the playlist the monster would shout “NO NO NO NO NO SKIP IT SKIP SNOWMAN SNOWMANNNNN” until the third week when she met the song with surly silence and then by the FIFTH week she was pleased to listen to me sing. The monster’s been seeing advertising for this movie in malls for months as well and basically any time Valentino and Asha were capering their way through a screen, she lit up and shouted and pointed and made a big scene.
The premise of this movie actually reminded me a lot of one of my all time favorite comics, Seven to Eternity, which I think I’ve talked a lot about here, actually. The premise of that comic is that in a fantasy world certain members of the community are born with special powers and they band together kind of like the Jedi (cough cough Empire) to bring order and peace to all, except for this one dude, the Mud King, whose power is that he can grant any of your wishes and in exchange you must share your vision and hearing with him so that he can use you as an extension of him.
So, lovely premise, was hugely interested in seeing how such an idea could be adapted for children. We went opening day we went to one of the earliest possible showings to avoid the crowds and ended up being one of the few people in theater (makes sense it was a matinee on a workday). Ultimately, the movie is weirdly long in the tooth while also rushing the world building. You can hear it in the soundtrack as well. Almost immediately upon applying for a job as the assistant wizard of the magic kingdom, Asha finds out that Soylent Green is people and goes through two or three songs to fight the convince herself to fight the power, which turns the movie into kind of a heist movie fairly swiftly? But the heist isn’t ingenious or difficult, really, and the conflict is brief and swiftly dispatched (“barely an inconvenience,” as they say). Partially, the the movie feels rushed and lumpy because the problematic nature of taking people’s dreams from them is ill-defined. One of the crew has aged out of having his dream and seems “boring,” but there are all sorts of loving, kind, thoughtful 18+ people in the kingdom, it seems, who raise families and do philosophy without any understanding of their central motivation. And then there’s the fact that the benefits of taking people’s dreams from them are also quite ill-defined.
Because, after all, some wishes ARE stupid. There’s this visual gag that’s definitely a gag despite the fact that no one laughed any time it was on screen, where a woman’s wish is to fly in the sky. Some people’s happiest is dependent on the unhappiness of others, just to what extent is really influential on how you come down on this villain. It’s nice that he doesn’t have Backstory and he basically seems to be a dude who ended up using the wrong book at the wrong time to try to solidify his grip on power. The merry band of rebels helping Asha are all, to borrow a phrase from Dropout’s Fantasy High Season 1, “democratic anarchists”, who believe individuals are entitled to pursue their own hairbrained, selfish, stupid dreams without having to assent to a unifying power. Strangely, once they’ve successfully rid the kingdom of its domineering king, they return it to a hereditary monarchy by installing… the king’s… wife to be queen. It’s okay, because the wife is kind of being held hostage in an quasi-abusive marriage, so she plots to overthrow her husband, but she doesn’t seem to be a big believer in rehabilitation.
Stakes are low. There’s really just this one cute little star called Star that would be really sad to see die.
Nothing that’s destroyed ever remains destroyed, which maybe sounds a little menacing, but really just means that there are some wildly kind properties to dark magic that allow it to preserve everyone and everything that it annihilates in the process of generating dark power.
One of the things that bothers me a little is that there’s this old dude whose dream is to “inspire the next generation,” but really it seems like he wants to take up the guitar or something. Anyway, the king rightly describes this as kind of dumb at best and ambiguously threatening at worst, and it seems like the movie is setting up for him to inspire Asha’s friends to maybe help her out when we enter the winter sequence, but as it turns out he’s nowhere to be fucking found when the going gets tough and the friends are more than willing to risk their lives to free a bunch of hapless people’s wishes, and then we never actually see him inspire anybody at the ripe old age of 100 later, which really seems like an oversight, because how long does it really have?
If you’re looking for something to succeed your monster’s obsession with the Frozen soundtrack this is not it, and if you’re looking for a movie that’s mostly references to other popular Disney movies, you should probably go and rewatch Wreck-It Ralph, right?
