This year, Disney celebrated their 100 year anniversary. As a way to celebrate, Disney released “Wish” on Nov. 22 to honor their past creations. They put in easter eggs, references and a 2D/3D animation blend. The idea seems to be an honoring movie for Disney, but to me, it’s just a mess. 

Disney released the movie soundtrack to help prompt the film but instead the soundtrack gathered a lot of hate on the social media platform Tik Tok with criticism towards questionable lyrics and sounds.  According to The Walt Disney Company, a main critique about the soundtrack is its pop songwriters Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice not delivering well. I have to agree. Michaels is extremely talented writing songs for singers like Conan Gray and Sabrina Carpenter, but she doesn’t fit the Disney songwriting mold. For example, the songs feel clunky and don’t have a traditional Disney-like rhythm.

Another criticism with this film is that the main protagonist feels “adorkable” which means weird and quirky, giving a similar feel to characters like Rapunzel, Anna, Mirabel and Moana. 

For some people, the animation feels clunky and unfinished rather than unique and new. 

“The 3-D makes the 2-D look automated and fake, while the 2-D jars uncomfortably with the 3-D such that the characters’ rounded, glowing digital faces sometimes float unmoored inside more traditional designs,” Journalist Bilge Ebiri from Vulture said. 

The overall issue seems to be how generic the movie is. A majority of people, even those who enjoyed it, have agreed about the generic feel to it. It tries to take influence from other films, but ultimately fails and becomes generic, and just a mediocre Disney movie. Also, while not diving too deep into the plot, before the final act where the villain snaps, the villain’s motive actually makes a lot of sense, and is kind of right. Everyone shouldn’t be able to make their own wishes as chaos will happen too fast. 

The funniest thing about this film is how this was made to honor Disney. The film holds pop songwriters, a classic main character stereotype and generic easter eggs that go mostly unnoticed or cared about.

If the goal was to honor Disney, “Wish” was not really the best choice.

“One suspects that Wish, as the company’s big anniversary project, was so fussed over by the powers that be that anything original or inventive about it was story-noted and sweatboxed out of existence along the way. That’s the generous reading. Because otherwise we might have to conclude that Disney has simply run out of ideas — and that’s a notion too apocalyptic to contemplate,” Ebiri said in his article.