Wish (2023 film)

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The sixty-second entry in the Disney Animated Canon, Wish is a celebration of the company's centenary.

The story is set in the kingdom of Rosas, where citizens surrender their wishes to the ruler, King Magnifico (Chris Pine), in the hopes of them coming true. When a young girl named Asha (Ariana DeBose) is interviewed to be his apprentice, she learns that Magnifico only grants those wishes that he thinks will bring good fortune to the kingdom. Determined to liberate all the wishes, Asha makes a fateful wish upon a star, bringing down... Star, a literal magic star. After her goat Valentino becomes a Talking Animal, Asha sets out to both free the wishes and hide Star from Magnifico.

Tropes used in Wish (2023 film) include:

• A Day in the Limelight: If Asha is indeed a young Fairy Godmother and Magnifico the Spirit in the Magic Mirror, then this is certainly the most focus either of the two have gotten.
• All Take and No Give: How Magnifico views his subjects. The man who considers fourteen granted wishes a high percent compared to the hundreds he has hoarded away.
• All There in the Manual: A Recipe for Adventure reveals a few things:
  • Magnifico's Green-Eyed Monster tendencies are partially rooted in feeling put out that Star came down when Asha called for help but no came to help him when he was a lad. The book also implies that he's The Sociopath, saying that the closest thing he can feel to happiness is being near the wishes.
  • Amaya's wish was to serve the people of Rosas.
  • Dahlia is from Taiwan and is a year younger than Asha.
  • Before giving up his wish, Simon was an active extrovert.
  • Asha's late father was called "Tomás".
• Ambiguously Human: In his Villain Song, Magnifico mentions that he got his genes from "outer space" but nothing is expanded on. It certainly would explain how he and Amaya haven't aged much over a century.
• Ambiguously Jewish: Asha consistently refers to her grandfather as "Saba", the Hebrew word for "grandpa" but there's no evidence of her being a practicing Jew.
• An Aesop: If you have a wish, you're the only one who can make it happen. You can ask others, like Star and Asha for help and the tools, but, at the end of the day, you have to turn it from a dream into a reality. Don't just passively hope someone like Magnifico will do it for you.
• And I Must Scream: Magnifico's ultimate fate is to be trapped in the crystal tip of his staff, hung in a dungeon forever.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Star.
• Bad Liar: For a Big Bad, Magnifico is pretty bad at coming up with convincing lies. He can't really come up with a reasonable sounding explanation for why he won't grant some wishes that doesn't sound petty. During the town meeting about the mysterious light, when Dahlia asks him some, rather basic, questions to try and stall him, his fumbling allows some townsfolk to poke some holes in his cover story. When he later tries this again, following his acceptance of dark magic, the townsfolk can clearly see he's lost it, but this time he's too powerful for them to do anything about.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Subverted. Despite Magnifico's citing of this, every wish is indeed the utterly harmless Mundane Wish it presents itself to be.
• Beauty Is Bad: Magnifico. Lampshaded by Gabo who states he's learned to never trust beautiful people.
• Broken Aesop: Downplayed. Though the film pushes An Aesop (see above) about how you're the only person who can make your wish come true, the film ends with Asha as Rosas' Fairy Godmother, in a position to grant wishes. Though it's also shown that the common folk are now doing things on their own rather than just defaulting to one mage to make their wishes a reality.
• Broken Pedestal: Magnifico becomes one to Asha after she learns that he's still holding onto wishes he knows he'll never grant rather than returning them to the people. His later Jumping Off the Slippery Slope extends this view to everyone else.
• But Now I Must Go: Star leaves Rosas at the end of the film to explore the world before returning to space. Though they might stop by one day.
• Central Theme: The wish in one's heart. Even if it never comes true, it still drives you forward and makes your hopes and passions possible.
• Control Freak: Strip through all of Magnifico's fancy speeches and you arrive here. Ultimately what wishes he grants comes down to how much he can predict their effects. He refuses to grant Sabino's Mundane Wish of being a Street Performer because Sabino's wish to "inspire people" could inspire a revolution.
• Crapsaccharine World: Rosas. On the surface, it's an Arcadia protected by the Good King who welcomes people from all walks of life and uses his magic to make dreams literally come true. But, Magnifico is only doing this as a some overblown Control Freak, preventing his people from advancing or progressing without his say so, literally taking away the drive and wishes that causes people to grow and create on their own.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Magnifico crushes three wishes to make his crystal staff. The wishes of the three people who found holes in his cover story at the town meeting and questioned if their wishes, the things he promised to keep safe, were still safe with him. When Amaya calls him out on this, he threatens to absorb her into the staff.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: The crux of King Magnifico's Villain Song, though it steadily morphs into Wants a Prize For Basic Decency. He sings about how he's not being respected for doing his job. The people do respect him, they were just scared (thanks to his cover story about a magical threat) and asking a few basic questions when they found holes in said cover story. As Amaya tells him in the novelizations, the fact that the people felt safe enough to ask him is a sign of how much they respect him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Though he refuses to grant it, Magnifico can't help but find Sabino's wish "beautiful".
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Asha accepts that the people don't have much say regarding if and when Magnifico grants a wish. There are so many people and he only grants them once a month that the law of large numbers is against them by simple mathematics. Her issue is why he's still keeping those wishes he knows he'll never grant rather than giving them back to the people.
  • Despite being a grumpy douche, Gabo keeps Star safe and is outraged that Simon betrayed the group. That said, his friends recognize that Simon, as had they all, had been gaslight by Magnifico and forgive him when he apologizes, recognizing that he was Brainwashed and Crazy by Magnifico's magic.
  • Queen Amaya accepted Magnifico's actions as Necessarily Evil to keep the peace. When she sees that her husband is only it in for himself, she takes a firm stand against him.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Magnifico.
  • Zig-zagged when it comes to the wishes. On the one hand, he does understand how important a dream is, justifying his locking them away to Asha as him protecting them from the dangers of the world. Which also reveals that he has no idea how important someone's passions and dreams are to them as a person, even if they go unfulfilled.
  • His initial interaction with Asha makes it quite clear that he does not get why she'd want her grandfather to be happy, fully expecting her to accept his paranoia over Sabino's ambiguous wording (despite the wish showing exactly what Sabino meant) as an objective fact.
  • It ultimately leads to his opening the Tome of Eldritch Lore outright and becoming a villain when he sees Star's light. While everyone feels a swell of goodness from Star's arrival, Magnifico can't conceive of it as anything but an attack against him, his fear of the unknown driving him to overt villainy.
• Evil Feels Good: As Magnifico discovers after opening the Tome of Eldritch Lore. Taking what he wants is a lot more fun than pretending to respect his people.
• Expy:
  • The Seven Teens to the the Seven Dwarfs:
    • Dahlia - Doc.
    • Simon - Sleepy.
    • Hal - Happy.
    • Gabo - Grumpy.
    • Safi - Sneezy.
    • Bazeema - Bashful.
    • Dario - Dopey.
  • Star has a few shades of Tinker Bell, being a mute magical being who sprinkles magical dust.
• Fallen Hero: Amaya describes Magnifico as such. He was a good man once but power, paranoia and complacency chipped away at his kindness before the Tome of Eldritch Lore finished the job.
• Guile Heroine: Asha doesn't have any magical powers, at first anyway, but her determination and cleverness makes her a legitimate threat to Magnifico's reign.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Magnifico at the end of the day. Fleeing villains, he sought to found a land safe from tyrants and oppressors only to become an oppressive tyrant himself.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Magnifico creates a crystal staff to trap Star. When Star escapes and flies out of its range, the staff reaches out for and traps the next most powerful magical being in close proximity: Magnifico himself.
• Hypocrite: Magnifico.
  • He's made a name for himself as a wizard. Yet he's banned magic in Rosas.
  • When he first meets Asha, he says that no one should see their dreams destroyed. He later literally destroys Sakina's wish right in front of her.
  • In his Villain Song, he views his relationship with his subjects as "All Take and No Give". He literally takes their wishes and hoards them in his castle. He pats himself on the back for fourteen wishes granted in a year (out of the hundreds, if not thousands, he has stockpiled away) being a high percent.
  • He also sarcastically notes how much he'd love to see the people do his job. Never mind that he loves his job so much that opening a Tome of Eldritch Lore was his first instinct when he thought his crown was in danger, he literally just tried to pawn off the responsibility of searching for Asha and Star to the people.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: How Magnifico justifies his hoarding away the wishes to Asha. Sabino initially parrots the line but upon getting his wish back, he has to agree with Asha that it's a lie.
• I'm Having Soul Pains: Going by the faces, it doesn't appear that having your wish extracted is a particularly pleasant sensation as it leaves the two who gave theirs up looking sad. And Simon's lethargy suggests this sticks with you for a while, him saying that he doesn't feel whole. And the people feel when Magnifico starts crushing the wishes. Sabino looks quite happy when he gets his back.
• Ink Suit Actor: Downplayed but there.
  • Aside from a few more freckles on her face, Asha looks a lot like Ariana DeBose.
  • Magnifico is pretty much an animated version of Chris Pine if he were a Silver Fox.
  • If Victor Garber was shorter, bald and grew a beard, he'd look just like Sabino.
• Irony:
  • Magnifico refused to grant Sabino's Mundane Wish to be a Street Performer on the basis that Sabino's wording to "inspire people" could inspire a revolution against him. Seeing what a paranoid tyrant Magnifico is for doing this inspires Asha to lead a revolution against him.
  • Magnifico threatens to trap Amaya in his staff when she questions how Obviously Evil he now is. Guess who gets trapped in the staff and later begs Amaya to free them.
• Jackass Genie: Played with for Magnifico. When he does grant a wish, he grants it as the wisher intended with no strings attached. Unfortunately, the standard for him to grant a wish is so high and arbitrary that the vast majority are going to go un-granted and the people have no idea that Magnifico has already decided that a decent chunk of them will never be granted. Becomes a more straight forward one after been corrupted by dark magic, granting Simon's wish but brainwashing him into being a loyal mook.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Deconstructed. Magnifico's descent from paranoid king to an outright villain is based off his paranoia that the magical light, Star coming down, is a threat, rather than any evidence (he even admits in his Villain Song that it might have been an accident). Were it not for Amaya being there, he would have opened the Tome of Eldritch Lore long before the town meeting.
• Knight of Cerebus: When Magnifico opens the Tome of Eldritch Lore, the film gets much darker.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Magnifico sought to trap Star in his staff to use them as fuel in his schemes. His ultimate fate is to be trapped in said staff, becoming an asset for someone else's evil schemes.
• Living MacGuffin: Star, whom Magnifico seeks to capture to enhance his own power.
• Never My Fault: Magnifico is furious that the people, consumed by fear, asked about the state of their wishes when he tries to start a manhunt for Asha and Star at the town meeting. Why did they ask this? Because he fear-mongered about dangerous magic in front of them to whip them into a frenzy. He also expresses annoyance at them thinking he should be the one to fix things. When he'd spent a century building the system to place him at the top as the sole decision maker and dulled everyone to rely on him.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • Several posters imply that Queen Amaya is as evil as her husband. She isn't.
  • A frequent tagline on the posters is Be Careful What You Wish For. But, as said above, this is ultimately subverted. The wishes made are totally harmless.
• Origins Episode: Suggested to be one to the Disney Animated Canon as a whole. Asha is implied to be the Fairy Godmother and Magnifico the Spirit in the Magic Mirror. Star Walking the Earth, it's implied, is why there are so many Talking Animals in the Disney movies. There's even a cameo by what's implied to be a pre-magic Peter Pan.
• Out-Gambitted: The heroes try to lure Magnifico away from Rosas so the others can liberate the wishes. Magnifico saw through Amaya's lies and sent Simon to lead Asha away so he could capture Star.
• Reality Ensues: Star grants Asha some of their magical power and a magic wand but Asha is still out-performed by Magnifico. Asha just got her powers and didn't have any practice. Of course she loses to someone who's been doing spells for the better part of a century.
• Red Herring: The film frequently implies that Gabo will sell Asha and Star out to Magnifico. It's Gentle Giant Simon.
• Revisiting the Roots: After a series of films that focused more on emotional generational trauma and Black and Gray Morality, Wish harkens back to Disney's Golden Age of Hollywood films, featuring an Obviously Evil villain and a Black and White Morality. Even the artstyle has more of a fairy tale book feel like the earlier films did.
• Riddle for the Ages: Why did Star come down only when Asha called? Not even Asha knows and since Star doesn't (or can't) speak, they're not saying.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
  • Magnifico refused to grant Sabino's wish because he feared that Sabino "inspiring" someone as a Street Musician could lead to someone inspiring a rebellion against him. Learning of this, and the feeble Insane Troll Logic that guides her king, inspires Asha to start rebelling against Magnifico's system.
  • Magnifico is convinced that the light of Star coming down was a threat to him. Ultimately Star does end up being a threat to Magnifico... but only because Magnifico was so convinced that there had to be a threat that he opened the Tome of Eldritch Lore and became an overt villain. Asha's initial goal was only to get back her grandfather's and mother's wishes and she needed Star's help to fly up to the wishes and pick them out. Once he becomes overtly villainous, only then do Star and Asha take a stand against him, as the wishes are now actively unsafe with him.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: Downplayed but Large Ham Valentino goes atypically quiet during the climax.
• Uplifted Animal: Any animal Star sprinkles their magic on gets the ability to talk.
• Villain Has a Point: Deconstructed with King Magnifico. While he generally doesn't grant wishes because he's a Control Freak, he's not wrong to say that some wishes are impractical or unrealistic (such as pre-magic Peter Pan wanting to fly). Indeed Asha does not disagree with this part of his reasoning. Her disagreeing with him arises from her questioning why he's hoarding wishes that he knows he'll never grant. People gave him their wishes on the promise they'd one day be granted, why would he not return the ones he knows he won't and let the people work on them? The answer is simply that hoarding the wishes makes him feel big. Just because the villain has a point, they can still be going about it in the wrong way.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: Inverted. As Asha says, Magnifico can win if the teens do nothing at all, meaning that they have to fight.
• Vocal Dissonance: Valentino is a baby goat... voiced by Alan Tudyk going full Large Ham. He lampshades it.
• Wants a Prize For Basic Decency: Magnifico's Villain Song has shades of this, him singing about how he'd volunteer people to help and wanting to be praised for his benevolence for largely just doing his job as king.
• Weak-Willed: The instant Magnifico was scared by the magical light, he made for the Tome of Eldritch Lore, stopping only because Amaya caught him in time. When he hits the mildest of roadblocks at the town meeting, he opens the tome.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Asha's initial reaction to learning the truth about Magnifico mixed in with "You Could Have Used Your Powers for Good". Asha understands that it's unrealistic to expect every wish to be granted but if he admits that he'll never grant most of them... don't the people deserve their wishes back then? Don't they deserve more than living as passionless zombies fed by false hope? The wishes were given to him with the promise, however slim, of being granted one day. If he's not going to grant them, why is he holding onto them?
• Wizards from Outer Space: Star and, possibly, Magnifico.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After Asha discovers that Magnifico doesn't grant most wishes he gets, he invites her to attend the wish-granting ceremony with Queen Amaya. Then, Magnifico makes a grand speech that seems to suggest he's going to grant Sabino's wish and that Asha got through to him. But he just grants some random woman's wish and then takes the time to rub it in Asha's face.