The True Meaning Of Disney's Wish Is Actually Pretty Dark (And All About Disney Itself)
This article contains spoilers for "Wish."
It's been 100 years since Walt Disney created The Walt Disney Company, which first produced short silent films like "Alice's Funnies." That film starred Walt Disney himself, in live-action, showing a little girl how he created his cartoons. The strange and anthropomorphic creations came alive on the screen in front of her in that ambitious early short, and after a day of behind-the-scenes magic, she dreamed herself into the cartoon world.
The events of the next century are much too voluminous to write them all down here but needless to say, Walt Disney's company underwent many changes. Original characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy helped make the studio an industry titan, and feature films like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Cinderella" cemented its box office clout. Disney's theme parks literally changed landscapes. And by the time the 100th anniversary of those original cartoons came around, the enterprise had ballooned into a gigantic corporation that owns everything from Marvel Studios to Lucasfilm to National Geographic to ESPN and far, far beyond.
In case you missed it, Disney now holds the titles to so many intellectual properties it could make your head spin. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, X-Men, Avengers, The Muppets, Mary Poppins, Planet of the Apes, Ice Age, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Omen, Die Hard, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alien, Predator, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Family Guy — the list goes on and on and on.
And to celebrate those 100 years of acquiring intellectual properties to build its "Magic Kingdom," the studio released "Wish" — an animated movie about why it's evil to hoard intellectual properties and why the only moral thing the rulers of a magical kingdom can do is give them back to their original owners.
Be careful what you wish for
"Wish" takes place in Rosas, a beautiful land ruled by the sorcerer King Magnifico (Chris Pine). He invited people all over the world to join his organization by exchanging their wishes for the right to live in and work for his kingdom, in the hope that he will one day use his magic powers to make those wishes come true.
The film's protagonist, Asha (Ariana DeBose), aspires to be King Magnifico's new apprentice, but she almost immediately discovers that he's not a benevolent ruler. He's actually running a scam. He doesn't just acquire the ideas and dreams of his citizens, he hoards them, and has no intention of letting most of his citizens benefit from the transaction. Only a small number of the people of Rosas see their dreams come true, and even in those cases, their dreams are corrupted to support King Magnifico's regime. As bad or worse, since the rest of the citizens no longer own their personal dreams, they cannot pursue them by themselves. They live hollow, empty lives because their fantasies were purchased by a tyrant who cares more about acquisitions than actual people.
Over the course of "Wish," Asha teams up with a magic wishing star to reveal King Magnifico's scheme and start a rebellion. Meanwhile, Magnifico starts studying the most evil magic of all, a corruption that the film explicitly states cannot be undone. He starts wrecking all the ideological concepts he has collected, his "intellectual property" if you will, to make himself more powerful. And in the end, the only way to stop him is to redistribute every piece of intellectual property he owns back to the people who created them in the first place.
This is NOT a subtle allegory
Actually, it's hardly an allegory at all. "Wish" isn't subtle about who it's calling out. The film, as a "celebration" of 100 years of Disney, is full of shout-outs to and Easter eggs from the company's own vast catalogue of intellectual properties. Sometimes, this amounts to little more than trivia — you can see the poison apple from "Snow White" on King Magnifico's desk if you keep your eyes peeled — but sometimes, it's an actual plot point.
We literally watch King Magnifico point out the wishes that contain the ideas for "Peter Pan" and "Mary Poppins," which he now owns. We also see him cackle with glee as he wrecks those Disney properties for his personal gain. The movie even ends with a scene where the new leader of Rosas tells Peter Pan to strike out on his own with a new creator, happily putting Disney's older properties back into the domain of the public — the "public domain," if you will — which is something the Disney corporation has fought legal battles to prevent for decades (to the extent that the Copyright Term Extension Act is also called "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act").
"Wish" ends happily with a world specifically designed to evoke Disneyland (right down to the type of castle you'd see in the opening Disney movie logos), abandoning the business practices that made the company powerful but arguably soulless. However noble Disney's intentions may have been when the company started, "Wish" argues that Disney has become corrupted and that the people currently running it (again, as an explicit plot point) cannot be the ones to save it.
The tragic kingdom
"Wish" isn't the first Disney film to be explicitly anti-Disney. Tim Burton's remake of "Dumbo" stars Michael Keaton as V.A. Vandervere, the owner of an amusement park called Dreamland. Vandervere has purchased the talents of great artists, and even purchases the flying elephant Dumbo himself, but the movie only ends happily when Dreamland's workers revolt and Vandervere uses a weapon hidden inside a building that looks suspiciously like the EPCOT Center (that and the Death Star) and accidentally destroys everything he's ever built. Burton later went on confirm that, in regards to that film, "I was Dumbo" and the film is "quite autobiographical at a certain level."
Whether the makes of ""Wish" will one day also claim they were intentionally making a film that undermined the Disney corporate ethos or whether they just subconsciously gravitated towards these themes isn't the point. The point is that even in the morally simplified world of Disney's family-friendly films, Disney would be the villain just because it does what Disney does. And in its attempt to celebrate 100 years of corporate growth, the corporation has, in a blistering lack of self-awareness, produced a film that effectively denounces what the corporation has accomplished in that century.
Whether you find that ironic or just tragic, it makes "Wish" an important entry into Disney's animated library ... just not for the reasons Disney originally claimed it was.