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Abstract :
[en] Marketed as the studio's centennial celebratory film, Wish was released in November 2023. More than Disney's 62nd animated feature, the film was actively made to celebrate the studio's history and legacy, starting from a bulletin board showing one scene of each of the 61 preceding classics (Buck as cited in Idelson, 2023). Presented as "throwback" (Idelson, 2023; Lee, 2023) yet innovative animation, the film received harsh critiques. It nonetheless embraced its celebratory purpose by exploiting the Disney canon through various forms of referentiality. I have argued elsewhere (Louckx, 2023) that these instances of referentiality can be defined as Easter eggs. Such references can assume different forms pertaining to characters, plot or dialogues, and world-building and are woven into the film at different levels corresponding to those of Gérard Genette's model of textual transcendence. In Wish, these Easter eggs serve as a homage – playful at times – to the studio's legacy but also seem to open new leads for future productions. By playfully recasting some of the studio's older characters (Snow White's seven dwarves becoming Asha's friends), Wish borders on the remake. However, its original plot highlights other kinds of narrative connections with Disney classics in the form of otherworldly backstories for previous characters animated or other (Star, the wishing star, Asha as an equivalent of Cinderella's fairy godmother, Sabino turning 100 as an embodiment of the studio), or a rewriting of the Disney Princess motif. Asha, the main character, seems to have the so-called "adorkability" (Lee, 2023) of the most recent princesses but is also a member of Rosas's ordinary folks. Although many critiques have read these elements as another way of rehashing the same hackneyed formulas (or as marketing plain and simple), one way of reading these practices may be a new richness in Disney's intertextual storytelling.
