Disney’s hundredth-birthday picture is handsome, brief and almost entirely empty. Ariana DeBose sings well and Chris Pine enjoys being wicked, but the story is a collection of nods to better films, and the songs are gone before the credits finish.
Rosas is an island kingdom with a good deal on offer: on your eighteenth birthday you hand your dearest wish to King Magnifico (Chris Pine), who keeps it safe in his tower and, once a year, grants a few. Asha (Ariana DeBose) is seventeen and wants to be his apprentice, mostly so she can put in a word for her grandfather Sabino (Victor Garber), who is about to turn a hundred and has waited long enough. Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn direct from a script by Jennifer Lee and Allison Moore, and the film was made to mark Disney’s hundredth year. That is what it is about. Nearly every scene nods to an older picture, and the question is whether the film has anything of its own to set beside them. At 95 minutes it does not have long to answer, and it does not.
The look is the best of it. David Womersley, Lisa Keene and Michael Giaimo have painted the backgrounds in a soft watercolour wash, with the brushmarks left in the skies and on the sea, so that for stretches the film looks like a storybook opened wide. The characters are modelled in the round and set into these flats, and the join shows; Asha has a weight the walls behind her do not. Still, when the star comes down over the forest and the light runs out through the trees while Dave Metzger’s score climbs, we felt the small lift we had come for. It lasted about a minute, and nothing later matched it.
DeBose sings with clear, unfussy power and plays Asha as a talker, anxious and over-explaining, which is a change after a decade of heroines who mainly gasp. Pine is better than the film deserves. Magnifico is a vain man who has decided that hoarding is a form of kindness, and Pine gives him a purr that curdles into a snarl, and the one song with a shape to it, in which he lists everything he has done for his ungrateful subjects. We laughed, and then noticed we were laughing at the villain because nobody else had been handed anything funny to say.
The rest of the cast are names on a poster. Valentino (Alan Tudyk) is a goat given speech by a falling star and given nothing to say with it beyond remarks about his own rear. The Star itself is a silent yellow face with arms, charming for one scene and a mascot after that. Asha’s friends, among them Dahlia (Jennifer Kumiyama), Gabo (Harvey Guillén), Simon (Evan Peters), Safi (Ramy Youssef), Hal (Niko Vargas) and Dario (Jon Rudnitsky), make up a gang of seven for a reason you will guess, and only Gabo’s grumbling registers. Queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral) is given a conscience and about four lines to use it. Sabino is the one person whose wish we cared about, and the film treats him as a prop.
The songs are the real failure, and in a musical that is not a small one. There are half a dozen or so, they arrive on schedule, and each is a list: of wishes, of grievances, of what a hero must now do. The lyrics explain the plot rather than lift it. Jeff Draheim cuts every number the same way, a crane over the crowd, close on a face, back to the crane, so that even the staging blurs into the next. We came out unable to hum one, and we tried, in the car park, out of professional duty.
The comparison the film invites is with the studio’s own past, since it spends its running time pointing at it. Buck and Lee were behind Frozen ten years ago, whose songs had somewhere to go and whose two sisters had a real quarrel. Wish has a girl, a king and a question about whether dreams should be kept in jars, which is a fine question for a picture book and a thin one for a feature. We were bored by the forty-minute mark, and then puzzled about how a film this short could feel this long.
Most critics have landed near where we have, a shade below the middle, and we see no reason to argue. A child under eight will get a wet afternoon out of it without harm, and the U certificate is honest. Anyone older will be left with Chris Pine complaining in a tower, which is a good twenty minutes and not enough to build a hundredth birthday on.
