“A Bunch of Disney Nerds”? Celebrating the Disney Canon in Wish and Once Upon a Studio

Wish and Once Upon a Studio (OUaS) were released to celebrate Disney’s centennial last year. Both films, through their reliance on character cameos and Easter eggs, sought to celebrate the Disney canon. This celebration assumed various formats, from plain reiteration to more subtle reappropriation. These can be read as a confirmation of the filmmakers’ status as fans and was confirmed by Wish’s head animator, Jennifer Hager, stating that “[the film] feels like it’s made by a bunch of Disney nerds, and I just fit right in with that” (Buck & Veerasunthorn, 2023). In Wish and OUaS, the filmmakers engaged with what Peter Cullen Bryan (2024) identified as the “intrinsic fannish desire of creating connections between favorite properties” (p.94). Discussing televisual shared universes, Bryan argues that such fan creations typically happen when the properties share the same creators or settings. However, as Jennifer Lee emphasized when presented with a pitch of OUaS, even though “people have been asking for the characters to be all together in a film …, it never really made sense as to why. … They don’t belong to the same world” (Murphy, 2023). In this presentation, I would like to argue that while OUaS provided this missing common story world by placing all the characters in a physical space in the real world — the Burbank Disney Animation Studio, Wish, went a step further by imagining for them an alternative history in the fictional world of Rosas. Like a shared universe “filli[ng] in the blanks” (Bryan, 2024, p.97), OUaS provides characters from the Disney canon with a consistent story space while Wish by engaging in what I would call a form of retrospective (rather than retroactive) continuity obers fans in the audience a reinterpretation of these characters’ shared history.