The Wish their Heart Made? The Disney Canon and Transtextuality in the Movie Wish (2023)

Marketed as the studio’s centennial celebratory film, Wish was released in November 2023. More than Disney’s 62nd animated feature, the film was consciously made to celebrate the studio’s history and legacy, starting with a bulletin board displaying one scene from each of the sixty-one preceding classics. Presented as a throwback-yet-innovative animation, the film received harsh criticism. It nonetheless fulfilled its celebratory purpose by exploiting the Disney canon through various modes of referentiality. These instances of referentiality can be defined as Easter eggs. Such references can assume different forms related to characters, plot, dialogue, or world-building, and are woven into the film at different levels corresponding to those of Gérard Genette’s model of transtextuality. This author of the article argues that the film not only pays homage to but also, in essence, keeps building the Disney canon by partaking in the studio’s prior canonisation strategies. By engaging in what can be termed a form of retrospective continuity, Wish confirms that the Disney animated canon represents a distinctive instance of a continuing multiplicity within the cinema industry – an ongoing tradition of technical achievements, as well as industrial and artistic excellence, that the film, as its last instalment, celebrates through its transtextual use of Easter eggs.