It’s a maxim on the left that conservatives tend to have a better instinctual understanding of the gravity of the current political moment than their liberal counterparts; they perceive the sinking ship nature of the situation, the problem of course is that they think the solution is to throw a certain number of passengers overboard to try to right it. Liberals meanwhile still want to bicker over who gets to hold the title of captain of the Titanic, but that hasn’t deprived them of a certain type of political clairvoyance as well. Their absorption, usually for the purposes of co-option, of leftist rhetoric has sometimes tricked them into revealing that they too understand the nature of the political moment, even if accidentally or subconsciously. Disney’s one-hundredth anniversary film Wish is perhaps the best example of that yet.
Wish started auspiciously, with some of its scenes and a song being released online that left many speculating as to how Disney’s animated movie quality had fallen so far, never the ideal discourse one wants around their movie. For a Thanksgiving week release it has started out very poorly, and less than ten minutes in its easy to see why. Word of mouth has pushed movies like Elemental’s weak opening, but Wish offers hardly anything that an audience could even remember by the time they reach their cars.
The animation has a few isolated moments, but is forgettable and in some instances looks noticeably worse than the Garfield trailer that played in the previews. The acting is abysmal, even by the low standards of a mass appeal animated movie. Most regrettable however are the song, each seemingly worse than the last. Lin-Manuel Miranda has taken a lot of blame for influencing the type of speak-talking faux hip hop style that now plagues animated musicals, but even the worst moment of Hamilton’s trial run off broadway puts the best song in Wish to shame.
It’s the story however that’s worth exploration. From the collective minds’ of the writers that probably feel their story is either apolitical, or at least a neutrally liberal capitalist abstract to a status-quo loving thesis. The king of a generic magical Disney kingdom controls the world’s wishes, and redistributes them at his discretion. The protagonist thinks that each individual should control their own wishes to have the chance to fulfill the.. Her grandfather is turning one-hundred, representing the Disney corporation and its many intellectual properties that it needs to privately own, and just wants to have his wish of inspiring the masses granted.
If the king is read as analogous to the state, it’s a clear screed against any regulation over intellectual property. If this sounds like a reach keep in mind Disney’s films over the last decade, including The Creator, a recent movie about the importance of not limiting so-called AI in creative endeavors, the new Chip and Dale which uses slavery as an analogy for pirating media, and Tomorrowland where people complaining about the state of the world is actually making it worse by limiting “creatives” and making them pay taxes. This would be well within the Disney wheelhouse to make a movie dedicated to defending the rights of individuals (corporations) to maintain control of their wishes (intellectual property). However, in their attempt to make a very pro-Disney case they accidentally make an anti-Disney one.
The film’s thesis is fundamentally correct: no singular entity should control the wishes or ideas, creative work, etc. of individuals. However, what Disney sees as the state is actually best representative by Disney itself. In the United States capitalism has created an economic system where Disney essentially functions like a monarchy where one single entity can have dominate control over the intellectual property and ideas of the landscape. In Wish the king’s study features countless bubbles, each containing small wishes of his people that he ultimately utilizes for his own benefit. If these are read as creative ideas, which seems to be the case in within the text as the king goes through them and several famous Disney films are portrayed in each bubble, then one has to read the king as Disney, hoarding them for their own purposes.
This isn’t just about their habit of having a strangle hold over copyright law, but also the way they have a near monopoly on most mainstream media at this point and will jam anything new into pre-existing intellectual properties or self-serving meta narratives or both. Disney has taken the place of any monarch or dictator, themselves ruling over a vast fiefdom of the intellectual world, controlling everything the light touches. Unlike Wish, there won’t be a single individual capable of redirecting this, for its prescription is, perhaps self-consciously, to just replace the bad monarch with a good one, boomeranging back to a liberal antidote.
Wish is not the Home on the Range or Bolt level monstrosity it will likely get painted as. If the Disney renaissance era represents several eights, nines, and tens, Wish likely would find itself as a cynical four or generous five on the numeric scale; a single thumbs up or two stars works just as well. It’s not terrible, it will entertain the kids before they go back to school next week. It will likely fade into obscurity, but it should be remembered as a hinge point in understanding how Disney views themselves publicly relative to knowing subconsciously the role they actually play.