: (Dave Metzger/Julia Michaels/Benjamin Rice)
The Walt Disney company loves the concept of a wish so much that it's
embraced a classic tune about it and named a cruise ship after it, and
2023's feature animated film,
, attempts to further
capitalize on its imaginative power. Traveling back in time to an older
style of animation, the movie puts viewers on an island off the Iberian
Peninsula where a king dabbling in sorcery grants occasional wishes from
common folk, but only if they don't conflict with his own interests. A
teenage girl, Asha, who seeks to be his apprentice, attempts to have her
grandfather's societally aspirational wish granted by King Magnifico but
sets in motion a series of events that causes a star to fall from the
sky and thus set up a power struggle between the throne and everyone
else. An endless parade of shameless references to older Disney films
reveals
as a warty appendage to the studio's lineup, and
audiences weren't immediately enthralled by it. While international
response to
was kinder to Disney, there's no doubt that the
project was a surprising domestic dud. One of the cited reasons for the
poor response has been the movie's lackluster soundtrack, which failed
to provide any singular memorable song and was laden with frightfully
abysmal lyrics. Disney, for whatever reason, hired a group of
songwriters and composers that were either directed to imitate prior
musical successes from the studio or that decided to take such a
conservative approach on their own. The result of their efforts is a
soundtrack that tries really hard to emulate the stylistic flair of
songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez
but falls completely flat in the process. Popular, award-winning
songwriter and performer Julia Michaels helmed the creation of the
songs, aided by Benjamin Rice and, for one song, JP Saxe. Meanwhile,
career orchestrator Dave Metzger was promoted to primary compositional
duties for the score. Nothing about this arrangement raised warning
flags up front, but in retrospect, this group of artists shows that they
made the most of their Disney opportunity by apparently trying not to
screw it up and little more. As such, you get a soundtrack that strives
so much to fit into a mould established by its predecessors that it
completely loses the magical touch that these projects must possess to
succeed. A reasonably fresh story concept is thus left without any
musical identity of its own.
One of the intriguing influences of Lin-Manuel Miranda
upon the Disney musical model is the stylistic evolution that
Moana and
Encanto brought to the table in the late 2010's
and early 2020's. The more traditional, formulaic approach set forth by
Alan Menken and those before him was waning, though Robert Lopez and
Kristen Anderson-Lopez struck a popular balance between the two
approaches with their
Frozen songs. Michaels and her associates
definitely take the Miranda path, but they cannot emulate the catchiness
of his songs nor the cleverness of his lyrics. Every song in
Wish
is a disappointment, even the two (why two?) ballads, "This Wish" and "A
Wish Worth Making." There are several reasons for this failure, but the
most foundational is the length of each melodic line within the songs.
The songwriters force too much lyrical action into each stanza, the long
lines causing the melodies to become lost in the process. Miranda
sometimes flirted with this danger in
Encanto, but Michaels takes
the whirlwind constructs even further and makes her songs
incomprehensible and unmemorable in the process. Not even the ballads
offer a catchy few bars that kids can sing on the way out of the
theatre, and the setting and villain songs range from generic to
obnoxious. The vocal performances by the two leads, Ariana DeBose and
Chris Pine, are fine, though Pine's attempt to mirror Dwayne Johnson's
infection and personality in
Moana's "You're Welcome" lands with
a thud. The ensemble cast's songs often throw the supplemental vocals at
the mix in abrasive ways, creating a level of annoying dissonance you
don't often hear in these musicals. Some of this issue of unwieldy group
vocals owes the inartful underlying constructs they are performing, some
of them taking popular fragments from Lopez and Anderson-Lopez's songs
to silly extremes. Also not to be underestimated is just how obviously
awful the lyrics are in these songs. The attribution for these lyrics
points squarely to Michaels, and they are embarrassingly ridiculous at
times. It's bad enough that the voices are performing in obnoxious
inflections over juvenile structures; the addition of the lyrics causes
at least half of these songs to be painfully unlistenable. The line late
in the mindbogglingly hideous "I'm a Star" that states "Ooh, I'm a star
/ Watch out world, here I are" is among worst single moments in Disney's
long history of musicals. (Do they think kids are total grammatical
idiots?) With the songs struggling badly throughout
Wish, the
score by Dave Metzger becomes the only marginal attraction.
Metzger has long been an orchestrator in the animated
realm, partnering with Mark Mancina and John Powell for decades and
accompanying Alan Silvestri through his Marvel scores. He finally joined
Alan Menken with
Disenchanted. More importantly, he had
orchestrated the
Moana and
Frozen scores and written
original music for the
Tarzan and
Brother Bear sequels and
a short 2023 film about the history of Disney animation. A cynic could
say that Metzger was the budget option for
Wish, but career
orchestrators like him often deserve such big breaks into the limelight.
One of the truly odd aspects of this soundtrack, though, is the total
disconnect between the songs and score. Metzger was well aware of the
necessary blend of the two and stated as much, but that didn't stop the
Michaels song recordings from barely exuding any of the orchestral
personality of the score. Instead, the songs take a much more
contemporary route, their distinctly modern pop approach not emulated in
more than one token comedy passage in the score. The inability of the
songs to enunciate their own melodies makes their incorporation into the
score almost moot. A five-note phrase from "This Wish" opens the score
and a variant from "A Wish Worth Making" features prominently late in "A
Wish Returns," "The Journey Calls," and "Rosas Finale." (It doesn't help
that several songs use similar five-note phrasing.) Other connections
are fleeting at best, the theme chosen by Metzger for "The Kingdom of
Rosas," "Rosas Celebration," and "Rosas Finale" not cleanly matching the
melodies of the setting "Welcome to Rosas" song. He chose Mediterranean
instrumentation only for these bookending cues; the acoustic guitar,
castanets, and finger cymbals don't adequately flavor the remainder of
the generically orchestral work. There's nothing particularly offensive
about the score aside from the atrocious "The Happy Chicken Song," but
the work is so terribly mundane that it emulates some of the most
auto-pilot John Debney equivalents. Without a strong basis of themes
from the songs or its own ranks, the score meanders through all the
expected Mickey Mousing, faux choral fantasy, and bubbly enthusiasm, but
there's no dramatic heft to any of it. A very dry recording quality
doesn't help, the female vocal in "Consulting the Spellbook" a rare
exception in ambience. The score is only available on the longer of two
album variants, though listeners won't hear the movie's references to
Leigh Harline's iconic song "When You Wish Upon a Star" on any product.
In the end,
Wish is perhaps Disney's biggest musical dud since
Hercules, a structurally and stylistically devoid entry and an
exhibit of just how wretched Disney lyrics can get.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Songs as Written for the Film: *
- Score as Written for the Film: ***
- Overall: **
