Last time the kids picked Wish as the family night movie, I was tired and fell asleep for most of it, or maybe I was working? Whatever happened, I missed the majority of the movie. But this time when they picked it, I had nothing else going on. So now I’ve seen a somewhat recent Disney movie. Unlike Friday, when I will probably see an extremely current[1] Disney movie. (Don’t tell the kids, they don’t know yet. They may not even know I took the day off work.)
Anyway, none of that is about sorcery and making wishes and if I’m being honest, pretty mediocre songs for the most part. See, this is the problem with Disney in a nutshell. In the dawn of time when most of Hollywood had extraneous musical interludes anyway, it could be forgiven. And then when it had become habit, well, I guess. But then for a while in the ’90s with Mencken and Rice, the songs were legit good. Then I’m not sure what happened, I was away for a while. I hear Phil Collins was involved? Anyway, then in the ’10s, about half the songs in Frozen were bangers, and right after that they found Lin-Manuel Miranda. So expectations are at an all time high!
And, as I’ve said, extremely not met.
Anyway, there’s this sorcerer, right? And he figures out how to extract a person’s fondest, most heartfelt wish. He uses this knowledge to set up an island commune where people come because their wishes are unattainable, and so they come and give him their wish, and he keeps it safe, whatever that means. But also, once a month, he grants one of the wishes. That’s the setting. The plot is that the main character girl has a job interview to be his apprentice, and what she learns during the interview makes her unhappy[2], so she sings a (decent) song about wishing that the way wishes worked was better than the way they actually work here. At the end of which, she has found perhaps a better way.
Then, most of the rest of the songs are pretty terrible, excepting only the main bad guy[3] song about being underappreciated, but also the plot is a little overstretched? But then when they got to the climax, that song is pretty solid and brings most of the rest of the movie back on track. It turns out the movie was about how you should follow your dreams even if they are difficult, instead of handing them over to someone else and just hoping something randomly works out for you, and ps it probably won’t. At least if it didn’t work out for you on your own effort, you still burned with its fire your whole life instead of being an empty shell.
And that’s a pretty good message for a kid movie, really. Not even a terrible message for an adult movie, all things considered. But I’d still rather just watch Encanto[4] for the 18th time.
[1] Heh. “Current”
[2] Spoilers: she learns (or maybe we learn this during the infodump scene, it would make more sense that way I guess) that when you give up your fondest wish, you also forget it, it’s just gone out of you entirely. And then, bigger spoilers, she learns that the sorcerer picks and chooses which wishes gets granted, and never grants the ones that are potentially dangerous to the island, by which he means dangerous to his control over the island. Like how an old man’s wish to be inspirational to the next generation is too vague, and might result in some kind of revolutionary uprising. (Specific boring wishes, like wanting to be the best hairdresser, those are okay.)
[3] Awesomely, his name is Magnifico
[4] I sort of understand why I don’t have a review of Frozen. No review for Encanto is simply inexcusable, though. Whoops.
