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Well, this is probably one of the only times critics on Rotten Tomatoes were actually right about something cause yeah, this film was not my cup of tea.

I don't know man, this seemed like an interesting idea to celebrate the 100 years of magic of Disney on paper. A movie that tells the origin story of the titular wishing star that has become such a staple of the Disney brand in which a 17-year-old girl named Asha makes a passionate plea to the stars in a moment of need after sensing a darkness in the Kingdom of Rosas that no one else does. But it was also going to harken back to traditional 2-D animation which in some ways it does, it was going to feel like a classic fairy tale which in many ways it is, and most importantly it was going to finally have an honest to God real villain again. No more twist villains or misunderstood heroes pretending to be villains just a fun, evil, entertaining villain from beginning to end which this movie does have. But I feel like everything that made those old Disney films charming, that made them interesting, that made you want to follow what was going to happen next is completely written out of this movie while also not doing anything new or memorable to make it stand out from the others. And in the process, it tells such a generic and uninspired story that it kind of gives off the impression that this movie was made just so the people working at Disney could be like or yeah, it's the 100th anniversary this year and we got to do something.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, Let's talk about the villain first because that was the thing people were probably most excited about going in. King Magnifico is by far the best character in the movie, and you can tell Chris Pine is having a lot of fun with this role. He's allowed to be delightfully evil, but I don't think he's enough to save this movie and I think a big part of it is that there's no clear motivation for him. Like you watch the trailers and clips for this movie, and you can see that the reason Magnifico doesn't grant peoples wishes is that he's afraid they might be dangerous. But at the same time, you can kind of tell he's just hording them in order to keep his power. I thought he'd be a twist villain not to the audience but the characters as some manipulator, but they don't do anything with it and instead have him be corrupted by some magical book a lot like Wanda from Doctor Strange 2. So therefore, he's just evil for the sake of it. I mean a lot of the other Disney villains weren't really developed either, but I feel like the creators wanted this character to be complex. He has a reason to not grant wishes and he has a tragic background on how he lost his previous home which informs why he's like this. But then the movie throws all of it away and suddenly he has no sympathetic traits. It's almost like as if there was a civil war with the writers on what he should be and, in the end, they compiled all of these ideas together into a mess. Meanwhile another thing that doesn't work about him is the fact that he's already in power and he just wants more. What made characters like Ursula and Scar interesting is the fact that they had goals they wanted to achieve. Most of them stemmed from power but they didn't have any of that at the start of their films and had to lie, cheat, and even murder to get said power. There's no character progression for him and he's just a powerful sorcerer king from beginning to end.

As for the main character Asha, I didn't really find her that interesting. A lot of people have gone on videos at how much like twist villains and generational trauma everyone is sick and tired of the quirky female protagonist and yeah, I agree. It was well liked in Tangled, The Frozen films, Moana, and Encanto but I haven't seen anyone praise Wish for dealing with similar traits due to the fact that Anna, Mirabelle, Moana, and Rapunzel feel distinct characters where Asha feels like a pale imitation of them. But on the bright side she's not like this throughout the entire movie so it didn't bother me too much.

As for the other characters their kind of forgettable.

The Goat sadly gets on my nerves. Alan Tudyk is one of the best voice actors working at Disney right now and I'm not going to act like he's trying to give a bad performance here. It's just the generic talking animal sidekick role. It's not funny, it's not relevant to the plot, it's just there for the children to laugh at. With that said though I will admit I kind of miss talking animals coexisting with humans in animated movies.

Asha's 7 friends meanwhile, aren't really memorable either. It's cute that there based on the seven dwarves but the fact that there's way too many friends mean's none of them get a chance to have a character outside of maybe the short sassy guy.

The queen isn't interesting either and I thought she would try to be the voice of reason for Magnifico since she seems to be the only thing keeping him from the deep end but no. "I guess straight white men in a capitalistic society have no chance at redemption."

Asha's grandpa and mother are completely forgettable, you can remove them from the story, and you wouldn't miss anything.

Meanwhile a lot of the background characters in Rosas don't have personality either. I remember the citizens of Beauty and the Beast and Encanto because they had character traits.

And the Star....actually I thought it was pretty cute even if it is just a luma from the Mario Galaxy games.

I think there's a little bit of a spider-verse style animation going on here with the 3-D animation and the 2-D watercolors. Occasionally it works with a lot of the background images and the Star. But other times it just becomes distracting mainly with a lot of the human characters. In the bad guys the animation worked because the characters were mostly made of CGI with only the eyes and teeth being made in 2-D. The only other characters that the animation works on are the animals and Magnifico mainly due to the fact they feel complete whereas everything else feels like rushed first draft material.

Speaking of Star though this movies depiction of magic feels very limited for some reason, like all Star ever does with is powers is making things big and have animals talk. Why not have things transform and have crazy things happen. Even the final battle feels very limited. Jafar and Maleficent at least had cool final battles and did anything with their magic. Here, it feels like the curse of the live action remakes has crossed over with the main studio.

As for the songs there fine...but pretty much anyone can sing and write them. The opening song has trouble with the rhyming, The I want song meanwhile I feel is the most generic one out of all of the other I want songs, Asha and Magnifico's duet is trying too hard to be a top tier song, I'm a Star is a bop and knowing what I know now is badass but not much else really.

But the song that really disappoints me is the villain song This is the thanks I get AKA the first villain that we've had since Shiny. So yeah, this is obviously a big deal. It's catchy but nothing else. There's nothing that feels sinister about it except for a brief few moments and it just feels lighthearted. Don't get me wrong there were other lighthearted Disney villain songs in the past like Gaston and Cruella Di Vill, but they had sinister lyrics to them to balance things out. This one doesn't so yeah pretty disappointing with or without context. And that applies to the rest of the movie.

There are other things I could say about it like the endless references to other Disney movies, but they weren't as obnoxious as Ralph Breaks the Internet, and I actually liked the end credits scene with all the Disney characters being made from stars.

So yeah, this is pretty much just another children’s film not a family film. The pieces were there to create something but yeah, I don’t feel like rewatching this so I don’t think its recommended.

4/10

Description

Well, this is probably one of the only times critics on Rotten Tomatoes were actually right about something cause yeah, this film was not my cup of tea.

I don't know man, this seemed like an interesting idea to celebrate the 100 years of magic of Disney on paper. A movie that tells the origin story of the titular wishing star that has become such a staple of the Disney brand in which a 17-year-old girl named Asha makes a passionate plea to the stars in a moment of need after sensing a darkness in the Kingdom of Rosas that no one else does. But it was also going to harken back to traditional 2-D animation which in some ways it does, it was going to feel like a classic fairy tale which in many ways it is, and most importantly it was going to finally have an honest to God real villain again. No more twist villains or misunderstood heroes pretending to be villains just a fun, evil, entertaining villain from beginning to end which this movie does have. But I feel like everything that made those old Disney films charming, that made them interesting, that made you want to follow what was going to happen next is completely written out of this movie while also not doing anything new or memorable to make it stand out from the others. And in the process, it tells such a generic and uninspired story that it kind of gives off the impression that this movie was made just so the people working at Disney could be like or yeah, it's the 100th anniversary this year and we got to do something.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, Let's talk about the villain first because that was the thing people were probably most excited about going in. King Magnifico is by far the best character in the movie, and you can tell Chris Pine is having a lot of fun with this role. He's allowed to be delightfully evil, but I don't think he's enough to save this movie and I think a big part of it is that there's no clear motivation for him. Like you watch the trailers and clips for this movie, and you can see that the reason Magnifico doesn't grant peoples wishes is that he's afraid they might be dangerous. But at the same time, you can kind of tell he's just hording them in order to keep his power. I thought he'd be a twist villain not to the audience but the characters as some manipulator, but they don't do anything with it and instead have him be corrupted by some magical book a lot like Wanda from Doctor Strange 2. So therefore, he's just evil for the sake of it. I mean a lot of the other Disney villains weren't really developed either, but I feel like the creators wanted this character to be complex. He has a reason to not grant wishes and he has a tragic background on how he lost his previous home which informs why he's like this. But then the movie throws all of it away and suddenly he has no sympathetic traits. It's almost like as if there was a civil war with the writers on what he should be and, in the end, they compiled all of these ideas together into a mess. Meanwhile another thing that doesn't work about him is the fact that he's already in power and he just wants more. What made characters like Ursula and Scar interesting is the fact that they had goals they wanted to achieve. Most of them stemmed from power but they didn't have any of that at the start of their films and had to lie, cheat, and even murder to get said power. There's no character progression for him and he's just a powerful sorcerer king from beginning to end.

As for the main character Asha, I didn't really find her that interesting. A lot of people have gone on videos at how much like twist villains and generational trauma everyone is sick and tired of the quirky female protagonist and yeah, I agree. It was well liked in Tangled, The Frozen films, Moana, and Encanto but I haven't seen anyone praise Wish for dealing with similar traits due to the fact that Anna, Mirabelle, Moana, and Rapunzel feel distinct characters where Asha feels like a pale imitation of them. But on the bright side she's not like this throughout the entire movie so it didn't bother me too much.

As for the other characters their kind of forgettable.

The Goat sadly gets on my nerves. Alan Tudyk is one of the best voice actors working at Disney right now and I'm not going to act like he's trying to give a bad performance here. It's just the generic talking animal sidekick role. It's not funny, it's not relevant to the plot, it's just there for the children to laugh at. With that said though I will admit I kind of miss talking animals coexisting with humans in animated movies.

Asha's 7 friends meanwhile, aren't really memorable either. It's cute that there based on the seven dwarves but the fact that there's way too many friends mean's none of them get a chance to have a character outside of maybe the short sassy guy.

The queen isn't interesting either and I thought she would try to be the voice of reason for Magnifico since she seems to be the only thing keeping him from the deep end but no. "I guess straight white men in a capitalistic society have no chance at redemption."

Asha's grandpa and mother are completely forgettable, you can remove them from the story, and you wouldn't miss anything.

Meanwhile a lot of the background characters in Rosas don't have personality either. I remember the citizens of Beauty and the Beast and Encanto because they had character traits.

And the Star....actually I thought it was pretty cute even if it is just a luma from the Mario Galaxy games.

I think there's a little bit of a spider-verse style animation going on here with the 3-D animation and the 2-D watercolors. Occasionally it works with a lot of the background images and the Star. But other times it just becomes distracting mainly with a lot of the human characters. In the bad guys the animation worked because the characters were mostly made of CGI with only the eyes and teeth being made in 2-D. The only other characters that the animation works on are the animals and Magnifico mainly due to the fact they feel complete whereas everything else feels like rushed first draft material.

Speaking of Star though this movies depiction of magic feels very limited for some reason, like all Star ever does with is powers is making things big and have animals talk. Why not have things transform and have crazy things happen. Even the final battle feels very limited. Jafar and Maleficent at least had cool final battles and did anything with their magic. Here, it feels like the curse of the live action remakes has crossed over with the main studio.

As for the songs there fine...but pretty much anyone can sing and write them. The opening song has trouble with the rhyming, The I want song meanwhile I feel is the most generic one out of all of the other I want songs, Asha and Magnifico's duet is trying too hard to be a top tier song, I'm a Star is a bop and knowing what I know now is badass but not much else really.

But the song that really disappoints me is the villain song This is the thanks I get AKA the first villain that we've had since Shiny. So yeah, this is obviously a big deal. It's catchy but nothing else. There's nothing that feels sinister about it except for a brief few moments and it just feels lighthearted. Don't get me wrong there were other lighthearted Disney villain songs in the past like Gaston and Cruella Di Vill, but they had sinister lyrics to them to balance things out. This one doesn't so yeah pretty disappointing with or without context. And that applies to the rest of the movie.

There are other things I could say about it like the endless references to other Disney movies, but they weren't as obnoxious as Ralph Breaks the Internet, and I actually liked the end credits scene with all the Disney characters being made from stars.

So yeah, this is pretty much just another children’s film not a family film. The pieces were there to create something but yeah, I don’t feel like rewatching this so I don’t think its recommended.

4/10