100 Disney Things [016]: 4+1 better movies Wish could have been

[chacusha]

100 Disney Things [016]

As I mentioned in my Wish review, the plot of this movie is kind of a hot mess. It very much feels like a movie that went through at least three or four major versions of the plot, and many of those elements are still hanging in the film like vestigial limbs, leading to a very disjointed and nonsensical viewing experience. Meanwhile, there are like 5-second sequences slapped on like pieces of duct tape in order to hastily close up glaring plot holes, which makes me think there was a strong need for this movie to release on a schedule and it was shoved out the door half-dressed.

Anyway, since this Franken-movie has the suggestion of three or four other coherent movies in it, I thought I would make some suggestions about how it could have been fixed by deciding on just one version of the plot and changing the elements to fully cohere with that central plot. So here we go: 4+1 better movies Wish could have been.


On a very basic level, what stories are about is the tension and contrast between heroes and villains. Therefore, I can summarize most of my alternate versions by what kind of villain is featured in the movie (what kind of villain Magnifico is).

#1: Magnifico grey and redeemed

Probably the easiest, lowest-effort way to have fixed this movie is just to redeem Magnifico in the end. Rather than waste time with a stupid stereotypical giant sky beam climactic confrontation, you would just need to have Asha face head-on the thing that was established earlier in the film as the root of Magnifico's villainy: the default defensive crouch of fear he has against anything that might threaten the safe haven he's built.

There's already enough in the film to set Magnifico up as a morally-grey (as opposed to outright evil) villain for whom having to confront his own fear is the obvious resolution of the tension in the film. It's established he fled war/some kind of unrest in order to establish the kingdom of Rosas, and that everyone who wants to live in Rosas explicitly gets told that they have to entrust him with their deepest wish, of which he only selects one infrequently to grant. All of this seems quite open and above-board. Asha seems to understand this system although reasonably gets upset when she pushes Magnifico to consider granting her grandfather's wish and is given essentially a hard no; while there is conflict between the two and Magnifico might be wrong in his approach, he isn't evil. Nor should Asha, having grown up in this society and been told how it operates, expect that her grandfather has the right to have his wish granted, even if she might be blindsided by and disappointed at the fact that Magnifico has no plans to grant the wish now or in the future, and the reason why.

Magnifico gets a villain song quite early in the film that contains some hints of narcissism (let's put a pin in that...) but doesn't clearly establish him as a terrible guy. In order to actually turn him into a villain, Magnifico first needs to basically interact with a demonic artifact that, like, turns people evil. And in case you're like, "oh, well, if the reason why he's evil now is because he touched the Artifact of Doom, then wouldn't the obvious solution be to undo/break the curse somehow?" -- well, don't worry, this movie contains a hastily-inserted scene where the characters look up in a spell book if there is a cure for touching the Doom Artifact and conclude that there isn't one. Bummer.

(Needless to say, this is not great writing.)

Anyway, all of this is to say, these are the kinds of plot points you insert into a story in order to establish that a character isn't evil, just misguided, or traumatized, or high on power, but in a way that is fundamentally solvable. There is a good person in there that, if the heroes fail to rescue him, then that is a downer ending where they have failed. On top of that, when you include the fact that your main character and the villain/antagonist have ideological disagreements (e.g. what should the wish-granting policy of Magnifico/Rosas be, and what wishes are too dangerous to indulge), the most satisfying resolution, if you agree with and you want the audience to agree with the protagonist, is for the protagonist to concretely change the world with their ideology. But when you have the antagonist just suddenly Turn Irreversibly Evil, you basically make ideological struggle and persuasion moot. Why would you do this in your story?! In both of these ways, the movie undermines at every turn the plot points that would have given a satisfying resolution to the ideological conflict between Asha and Magnifico, leaving the resolution we get in the film an underwhelming, "...I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

It would have been SO easy and low-effort to tweak the ending to give the final battle between Asha/Star and Magnifico a different resolution that this would have been by far the easiest way to fix this movie's plot. It's so obvious, too, how you would go about this. The all-powerful but childish/naive/innocent/playful Star is thematically the opposite/antidote to Magnifico's traumatized paranoia. Be cheesy about it -- go full Ratatouille and have Star unlock memories of innocent childhood in Magnifico that makes him realize how different of a person his trauma has shaped him into being or makes him remember the childhood whimsy of dreaming and wishing for impossible things or something hella cheesy like that. Have Star, assisted by Asha, touch Magnifico's seemingly-too-far-gone heart in a way that seems impossible and miraculous. Come on, this is simple!

One has to suspect that the main reason why they did NOT have an ending like this despite how easy it would be to do and how improved the result would be is simply because redeeming Magnifico would require giving up the Easter Egg where Magnifico, trapped in a mirror (oho, see the payoff of that narcissism foreshadowing I put a pin in earlier?) becomes the Magic Mirror from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This ending/reference would not be possible to put in if, y'know, Magnifico is alive and well and not evil at the end of this film!

However, I think Disney really needed to kill their Easter Egg darling in this case. You already have enough Disney movie references in this film, Disney! One more is just not worth ruining your movie over!

#2: Magnifico evil; Queen good

The second most minimal rework would be to make Magnifico a straightforward villain while keeping the queen (Amaya) good. "Isn't this how the movie actually ended up playing out?" you ask. Not quite -- what I mean by this alternative is that Magnifico needs to, like, actually be evil of his own volition. No Touching the Demon Artifact cop-outs here -- Magnifico needs to go down the dark path on his own.

This change, however, causes further problems. Namely, if Magnifico is bad and Amaya stands by his side loyally, she is also morally implicated in Magnifico's evil, even if through indirect support! In fact, even if Magnifico isn't evil, the mere establishment of ideological conflict between him and Asha, and Amaya's complicity with Magnifico's wish-granting policy for YEARS makes her morally implicated and part of the system that Asha finds so objectionable. This needs to be addressed head-on if you wish to redeem the queen/have her eventually side with the good guys, but for some reason, Wish, in its current form, doesn't seem to want to address this glaring issue head-on.

While they establish Amaya as having concerns about Magnifico, with the writing's indecisiveness about whether Magnifico is a bad guy or not, the queen ends up not coming off favorably in her initial support of Magnifico, but nor does she come off as particularly heroic or triumphant when she eventually breaks from him and turns against him. ...There is also the problem that the film seems to be muddling multiple versions of the plot so that when Amaya joins the revolution and turns against her husband, she says things about him that seem to just not be relevant to this version of the movie, where she seems to be blaming him for succumbing to the temptation of magic that she earlier was afraid might take control of him, and yet seems to be treating Magnifico's choices as ultimately his decision and that he deceived her. ??? Weirdly mean and unsympathetic toward her husband who SHE KNOWS is basically struggling with the call of forbidden magic or whatnot, in a way that makes the queen come off as more villainous than Magnifico and yet somehow karma houdini-ing her way out of any consequences by the film's end.

Okay, let's fix this! It wouldn't take that much work -- you just have to establish Magnifico as more sinister from the start. Even before he touches the Demon Artifact, it has to be clear that he's the kind of person who would struggle more than most with not touching the Demon Artifact, and not because he's scared and traumatized but because he's power-tripping. Having Amaya have hesitations or doubts about the way Magnifico runs Rosas even before shit starts getting real would be really helpful for this. So would having Magnifico have a Kick the Dog moment early in the film, especially involving Amaya specifically, in private, where Magnifico is callous or belittling toward her in a way that the audience can immediately pick up as indicating that this guy is Bad News -- a moment like that would go a long way in making it both understandable why Amaya stays by his side while also exonerating her from the worst of Magnifico's policies and slide into darkness. If she herself is kind of afraid of and cowed by Magnifico in their relationship, then she is less responsible for the things he does and it's also more meaningful and brave/triumphant when she finally makes the decision to leave him.

Or if you don't want him to be outright abusive, just have Magnifico be making poorer and poorer decisions over the years as he increasingly lets his actions be dictated by his fear and the need to control everybody, and Amaya, of everyone, noticing and being hurt most by this tragic change in his character would add a note of pathos and tragedy to their love story. Have Rosas be just a bit more dystopian under Magnifico -- safe, and highly desirable to move to due to this safety, but if people want to get in, they have to agree to play by Magnifico's rules and the whole society has been shaped by him to serve and benefit him. Have Amaya make excuses for him until she realizes he used the forbidden magic and now she realizes he's gone beyond where she can reach him. Perfectly cromulent plot!

#3: Magnifico evil; plot twist: Queen is also evil

This would require more of a rework and I don't really like plot twist villains anyway, but if you wanted a more complicated villain situation other than "Magnifico is bad and it's kind of obvious from the start that he's the villain," you could utilize the queen as a plot twist villain. There's even aspects of the film that support a plot like this -- the revolution song, "Knowing What I Know Now," features a moment when Asha's group of fed-up rebels freeze when the queen finds them, uncertain whose side she will take. This is very interesting because it means the queen uniquely is in a position to both benefit from the privileges of being #2 in Magnifico's regime, but also has enough separation from him and trust from citizens that she could join the revolution and win Asha's trust that way. And then when the queen just straight up tells a different story about Magnifico in a way that demonizes him but hits a note of "I should have known better, I'm so sorry," it just FEELS really manipulative and self-serving in a way that made me think, "This is interesting!"

Wouldn't it be interesting if Magnifico and Amaya were in cahoots the entire time, a fun evil power couple, but where enough people are still loyal to Amaya and want to believe the best of both her and Magnifico such that they trust her to join their rebellion and then at the last minute, she backstabs them and uses her knowledge of their plans to cut the legs of a nascent revolution out from under it? There are a lot of evil queens in Disney movies so maybe not the most stunning of plot twists, I will say -- and I was going to say that there aren't that many female plot twist villains, so that would be new at least, but then I remembered that actually, there are a *ton* of female plot twist villains in Disney's canon lately. There's the sheep mayor (Mayor Bellweather) in Zootopia (2016), Screenslaver in Incredibles 2 (2018), and the doll (Gabby Gabby) in Toy Story 4 (2019), so uh... no, this would not be particularly fresh storytelling. (They just really love those plot twist villains.)

So yeah, this plot with a plot-twist villain queen would be pretty trite and a bit ridiculous. However, it would nevertheless be more interesting and coherent than what we got. Having a plot twist villain queen would also be helpful for having Asha have a character arc of increasing disillusionment, where she starts off the movie pretty uncritically accepting the society that she grew up in, and it's only initially a minor thing that causes a crack between her and Magnifico (him declining to grant her grandfather's wish). Not being inclined to be rebellious, though, her instinct is to want to trust the queen and buy her story that she'll talk sense into her husband, etc. It's only a betrayal by the queen that makes Asha finally find the strength to lead a rebellion herself, etc.

#4: It's complicated: Magnifico grey; Asha also grey

The other option, which is more of a rework of the whole film but would probably result in a more interesting, more mature, and less stereotypical story, is to have the central conflict in the film be the difference between Magnifico's approach to wish-granting and Asha's. The movie... kind of half-heartedly does this. At the end, Asha ends up as a kind of magical wish-granter of her own (basically mirroring Magnifico), and through costuming it's kind of implied she is e.g. Cinderella's fairy godmother, implying that wishes like Cinderella's are/will be the kind of wish Asha ends up granting, but the movie ends without actually explaining what the difference between Asha and Magnifico's wish-granting policies is/will be. The only other possible hint given about what Asha's wish-granting policy might be is that you get a glimpse of how Queen Amaya grants wishes, which is without magic and mainly by connecting people with compatible skills with each other so that they can work together to make their own dreams come true -- a method that has quite a whiff of venture capitalism to it (#GirlbossAmaya). It's a clear contrast between Amaya and Magnifico, though, and has some interesting political implications as well -- if everyone is responsible for making their wishes come true, then there are no wish gatekeepers here, a clear break from Magnifico's role in Rosas and his ultimate failing. This system also recognizes that some wishes are too difficult for someone to achieve on their own, so then teamwork makes the dream work. This is neat -- a total democratization of magic and a new paradigm where people take responsibility for their wishes while also it being critical for society to come together to help make people's dreams come true.

...So then what about Asha? Where does she fit into all of this, with her magic wand that allows her to magically grant wishes and thus puts her in the role of a new wish gatekeeper and her super special Easter Egg title of fairy godmother? Oops, end credits are rolling! I guess we don't have time to answer this question, darn!

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if the movie was ultimately about grappling with this question, of how Asha's approach to wish-granting differs from Magnifico's? The movie raises this question of what do you do with people's wishes that can be a danger to society, but then just basically papers over this question by having it be the case that Magnifico's traumatized paranoia makes him see dangers and threats around every corner and he isn't good at assessing threat at all. What to do with dangerous wishes becomes a moot point when it's the case that the guy tasked with granting wishes has completely unreliable judgment and so couldn't do his job properly anyway, even if we all agreed that dangerous wishes shouldn't be granted.

But the movie would be stronger if it actually grappled with this question. "Magnifico's approach DOES make society safer but At What Cost?" is what the movie should be saying. At the end, there are various possible contrasts you can make with Asha's wish-granting approach and Magnifico's -- for example, the obvious one would be that Asha has a more "yes and" approach to wish-granting where she grants them by default. In this case, the movie does need to actually reckon with the cases where someone's wishes are evil. Where does Asha draw the line?

Or, alternatively, you could have it that Asha's approach is more passive than Magnifico's, where she leaves it to people to keep their own wishes (rather than taking and holding them as Magnifico does) and thus mostly retain responsibility for making their own wishes come true, but then Asha will sometimes step in at the last moment to give a hard-working and decent person the final push they need to get over the finish line -- best represented, actually, with the Fairy Godmother and Cinderella. Cinderella actually does most of the work to earn her own happy ending but it's only at a particularly gutting setback that the Fairy Godmother comes in to save the day, but only in a very limited way, with explicit limitations on her magic. After the spell goes away, Cinderella still has a long way to go before her dreams can come true, and it's through her own past actions and her determination to not give up that she ends up succeeding -- without her Fairy Godmother's help this time. If you want to keep the cute little Disney reference Easter Egg, Disney, you can keep it.

But the movie doesn't actually focus enough on Asha and her wish-granting philosophy to feature either of the above options. There are just WAY too many other elements and plot points going on in this movie for the movie to have anything interesting to say here. But like with all my proposed reworks, there is enough material already in this movie to help in crafting a better version of this movie in this vein!

First, there is Asha and Magnifico's disagreement about whether her grandfather's wish to inspire people with his music is "dangerous." Asha insists that her grandfather would never hurt people, but Magnifico finds this wish worryingly vague -- "Create what?" he says. "A rebellious mob, perhaps? To inspire them to do what -- destroy Rosas, maybe?"

Asha insists she knows her grandfather well and that he wouldn't do that, so then this obviously raises the obvious fix -- why is her grandfather's wish so vague? Could he not just tighten it up to be more pacifistic and innocuous?

But this is kind of brilliant -- the best answer to that question is no, he can't, because the open-endedness of his wish is intentional. It is actually true to her grandfather's wishes that the thing he inspires people to do be left open and flexible. The reason it's brilliant is because later in the movie, there IS a rebellion that does end up ending Rosas as people know it. You could have Asha initially insist her grandfather would never harm anyone, but then later her grandfather comes in and uses his music (or whatever) to inspire the discontent fugitives on the run to build a better Rosas, and at that moment Asha realizes that Magnifico was right -- her mild-mannered grandfather's wish is potentially dangerous, and Magnifico was right to fear it.

In this way, it could have been the case that, over the course of the movie, Asha *does* see Magnifico's perspective that wishes can be both good and bad; they can be harmful and dangerous. But she still chooses the path of trusting people and knowingly takes the costs of less safety in exchange for the justice of people being allowed to follow their dreams.

By the end, you wouldn't really know if she was right to make that decision, but one thing that's for sure is that the old system under Magnifico wasn't working. In this version, the story of Wish could be a coming-of-age story about Asha learning about the costs of responsibility and living in a society where people can hurt you -- costs that Magnifico was not willing to pay which led to his system breaking down. But Asha, as the new custodian of people's dreams, could then decide to give them back to people.

There's enough material to support this more complicated fight between Asha and Magnifico's perspectives, but this plot seems too mature, nuanced, and ultimately, well, political for Disney to want to touch it. It would have made Wish highly relevant to politics in the U.S., raising questions like, "is armed revolution justified when your king is a tyrant?" and "is safety worth the cost of freedom?" which is probably why Disney wanted to steer way clear of all that. But it's a shame. Anyway, thank you for attending my TED talk of how I would make Wish into a Star Trek episode.

Bonus: Genre shift to romance

The last alternative Wish is the one based on the original concept of Star as a shapeshifting star boy. The first time I encountered anyone talking about Wish, actually, was on DeviantArt, where a lot of people were drawing fanart of the Fae Star Boy concept of Star. That kind of word-of-mouth advertising is what helps a movie become successful, and what's ironic is that the discarded concept of this film managed to pique people's attention more than the film we actually got...

Disney has been criticized for having too few non-white heroines and also for placing too much emphasis on romance for its female characters, and I think it has responded to this criticism by having more women of color princesses (or princess-like characters, if not princesses) and carefully avoiding giving them any romances. I feel, though, this attempt to be both less racist and less sexist simultaneously has run afoul of a different intersectional racist+sexist phenomenon where women of color aren't really given romances and rarely seen as romantic material or allowed to be softer and more emotional. It's hard to thread the needle here so I don't really blame Disney for erring on the side of caution in minimizing romance plots for its heroines but I'm just saying I think they could probably afford to stick their head out a little and give their WOC heroines a central romance plotline once in a while and hopefully the world won't flip out at them.

I'm not really sure what the film would have been like if it had been just a straightforward romance -- I kind of suspect/fear the original plan featured the same ending where Star and Asha part ways at the end, so the movie would ultimately have shied away from having a romance. But let's assume a movie that wasn't skittish about being a for-real love story: For Wish to be a romance, the movie would have to be completely retooled since there's not really much in there that supports a romance aside from the buddy road trip that Asha and Star (and completely unnecessary character Valentino *sigh*) go on, which IS a pretty classic setup for a romance plotline. You would need to add a ton more scenes and interactions between them. But still. I think Jack Frost-esque Fae Star Boy Twink would have done the numbers.

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Welp, that's done. About 4 hours of my life diagnosing this movie that I'll never get back. You can suggest topics for future posts for this meme over here.