Disney’s ‘Wish’-ful Thinking: The Illusion Of Inclusivity In Disney Movies

Wish is Disney’s latest addition to the studio’s animated folk anthology.

Styled in a Medieval theme, Wish honors tried and true tropes giving nods to classic Disney conventions like the dizzying city life portrayed in Notre Dame, the rag wearing townspeople of Beauty and the Beast, and the royalty of Frozen, Tangled, and Cinderella.

The Story: Wish is a coming-of-age story that follows 17-year-old Asha as she attempts to dethrone an evil monarch who’s gone bananas with power.

The Monarch, King Magnifico, is a subdued reproduction of Jafar from Aladdin. The menacing intentions of Magnifico are not nearly as perverted as Jafar. When Magnifico is introduced he is presumably a good guy who gets corrupted by greed. This gives Magnifico some humanity and as a viewer you feel some sympathy for him. Jafar on the other hand was a sicko from the start.

Anyway, Magnifico steals people’s dreams and aspirations and keeps them in these little bubbles locked in his castle. Asha somehow manages to bring a spritely star to life by wishing upon it and it becomes her sidekick.

Once the star descends to earth it wastes no time putting its magic to work giving all the forrest creatures human voices, enlarging an entire coup of chickens, and giving Asha a magic wand that can make spider legs grow on a vegetable cart.

For some reason its magic is otherwise useless and provides no support in the fight against Magnifico.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but if you’ve seen one Disney hero story you’ve seen them all. In the end Asha wins and Magnifico suffers the same as Jafar did.

How was the music?

The music sucked. The songs were all produced in spoken word chants over generic Disney beats. None of them were remotely catchy, but they helped recap the story every 10 minutes in case you had to go to the bathroom and missed a few scenes

How Disney WhiteWashes Animated Characters

Disney prides itself on being a trailblazer in diversity.

Unlike shows and movies that use human actors on screen and have smaller pools of actors to choose, Disney is in a unique position to just simply animate characters in to their movies.

So in Wish there were a lot of Black families portrayed, and a ton of racially ambiguous characters where you couldn’t quite tell if they were Asian, Black, Latino, etc.

But underneath the added skin tones they were all white, just like every Black or Latino Disney character.

Even Coco, the little Mexican boy, was basically white. Sure he periodically utters simple Spanish words like “Abuela” and hangs out with people wearing Sombreros, but in between these shallow displays of his “heritage” he otherwise acts white and so does everyone else in Disney movies.

Wish was the same – everyone was white even if their skin tone said otherwise.

It’s like those Amazon commericals that feature Black families. The typical scene progression for the average holiday commercial shows a Black family dressed in matching plaid and festive socks, hopping into an SUV, pulling up to their parents house in a giant suburban home and presenting a tray of pineapple lasagna with raisins in it as Grandma asks Alexa to play some traditionally recognized “Black” song, but not Black enough to scare off any white folks watching – like something by Marvin Gaye.

And while I can’t speak on what Black culture is really like – maybe raisin lasagna is a Black thing – I can speak about Jewish culture and a recent Amazon commercial that portrayed Jews on Hannukah.

It showed a living room decorated with festive holiday lights, and then a family of Jews in holiday sweaters huddling around a fully lit menorah as they all smile and the dad guided the hand of his little son to help light the candles. The menorah is beautiful and it’s set on this regal velvety platform right in their window for everyone to see. – Basically, it depicted the typical “white” holiday season.

That is not what happens in an average Jewish home.

First you’d hear dad yelling at the kids to come downstairs to light the menorah. Nobody would be in festive gear.

Then they’d turn the lights off and quickly mumble through the prayers. The candles would be stop and shop birthday candles placed on a flimsy menorah that you could hardly see through the gobs of dried wax covering it.

As soon as it was over the kids would run upstairs and go back to their iPads.

What’s the takeaway?

The takeaway is that even the whitest people you know aren’t white enough to live up to the stereotypes portrayed in DIsney films and Amazon commercials.

So when they impress these whitewashed stereotypes on non white people it makes their attempts at diversity seem really forced.