2023-11-28 08:30:00
Bland and sad, Disney’s latest production fails in its homage to the 100 years of the studios through its lack of coherence and its sloppy settings.
The new film from Disney Studios, Wish, is eye-catching. A case of artistic direction clearly displaying a mixture of three-dimensional characters and two-dimensional settings aping watercolors (to the point of depicting the grain of probably digital paper). A not so original mix, to the extent that it can – in theory – evoke the approaches of Michel Ocelot or a Spiderman: New Generation. Except that in the film by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck the mixture never results in a coherent image. From start to finish, his plans seem torn, the characters in volume seeming too brutally placed on the flatness of the settings to really inhabit them. Rather than creating the strange (the original, as with Ocelot), the cocktail only results in strangeness, in an assembly of disjointed, heterogeneous layers. The fault perhaps lies in poorly executed compositing, since all this post-production work consists precisely of unifying the different layers of an animated image by lighting or material effects. The fault may also be in the sparseness of certain settings, particularly of the crowd, where the characters in the second and third shots are so poorly cared for or animated (they sometimes remain perfectly still) that they seem deliberately left in a hiding fog. misery. Incomprehensible for a long at 200 million dollars.
Gas station mascot
If Wish catches the eye, it is in the form of a stamping. The image gets in the way of what the film is trying to tell. A story almost seductive in its seditious side. After a few minutes of pure naivety, the film confronts young Asha with the political reality of Rosas, a medieval utopia over which reigns the magician Magnifico, an old handsome man with the face of a TV presenter. In truth, a tyrant who convinced his citizens to trade their dreams (symbolized by bouboules containing each person’s dearest wish) for comfort and security. This awareness, coupled with an awakening to magic, places Asha at the head of a rebellion led by her friends, a goat with the voice of Gérard Darmon, and a star named Star (that must have been very turbulent), improbable cross between a Pokémon, a gas station mascot and Clippy the paper clip who guided Windows 95 users.
Rapunzel substitute
We would like to let ourselves be seduced by this new princess who sings of the sadness of renunciations (“growing up means making concessions”) or calls for overthrowing power (“not my king!” in the “not my president” way), if she could forge some semblance of an identity. Except that everything in her gestures, her design or her voice condemns her to being nothing more than a substitute for Rapunzel. Bland and sad. Like his companions, one resembling Kristoff (the guy at the reins of Frozen), the other like Linguini (the little chef from Ratatouille) but depressed. The entire film evokes a Frankenstein creature patched together from scraps of other homemade creations. Perhaps we did not understand that this is a tribute to the 100th anniversary fiesta? It’s hard to believe it, as the “winks” are already abundantly spread, from Little Jean who exchanges with Bambi, to a body-built Peter Pan. Rarely has a Disney lived up to its name so well: in schoolyards, the expression “from ouich” is used to designate a product of poor quality.
Wish, Asha and the Lucky Star by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck, 1:35.
#Disney #studios #bad #star #Libération