"Wish" is Disney's most classically liberal in years
For its 100-year anniversary, Walt Disney company released an ambitious animated film entitled Wish. Chock full of references and allusions to earlier films, seemingly fitting the anniversary it celebrates, it takes risks in attempting to capstone a century of filmmaking, and in the opinion of most critics, these risks did not pay off - the film scores only 48% among critics on Rotten Tomatoes and derided as “forgettable”, “generic”, or “irksome”. The audiences, by contrast, were somewhat more forgiving, giving an 81% audience score on the same site. Not being a trained critic or student of film, I have to throw in with the audiences, though I’m unqualified to defend that opinion on any particular aesthetic grounds. But the messages in the film, in terms of its overall structure and character choices, are, for a liberal, exceptionally admirable on the level of ideas.
A character who chooses her path and a challenge to the status quo
There are of course many ways to assess the liberal virtues of a piece of media - representation, plot points, linguistic decisions. However, one model I would propose starts with two questions: do the characters in narrative choose their goals and paths, or are they foisted on them by fate or position? And secondly, do those goals intend to defend or challenge the status quo of the societal setting?
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The massive success of the Marvel cinematic universe drew attention to the fact that most of the films include a fundamentally conservative narrative - Iron Man and Spider-Man and even Black Panther seek to defend society more or less as constituted, or at least, in the last case, moderate and manage necessary reforms in the face of revolutionary danger. There is nothing inherently wrong with stories like this - society does need protectors, after all! Mulan is a good example of this kind of story ‘working’, especially as it is about a young woman consciously choosing to break her gender roles in an effort to defend her society. But as Thomas Paine wrote in the Rights of Man, “The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.” If we are to encourage each generation to challenge and reform its society anew, we need stories that encourage it.
Aggregated, the kinds of tales that emphasize preservation can create a narrative world where all serious problems come from threats to the status quo, not from problems within the extant society itself. The live action Mulan released more recently drove this point home, with its elevation of the Emperor and denigration of the nomadic invaders released against a backdrop of Xi Jinping’s increasing authoritarianism and the cultural suppression of the Uighur people by the current Chinese government, which helped sponsor the production of the film.
On the other point I’ve written before - discussing the difference between films that see characters from either an ‘essentialist’ or existentialist point of view. Given the value American society ostensibly places on being classless and ‘equal opportunity’, it is surprising how much of our narrative media focuses on characters whose primary internal conflict is in recognizing and carrying out duties assigned to them by birth, class, or even happenstance. Simba must act because he is the son of a king, Moana must act because she is chosen by the ocean, Mirabel Madrigal has to act due to the family into which she is born. The essence of each of these characters precedes their existence.
None of these films are necessarily illiberal, and indeed their messages can be quite strong. Elsa and Anna in Frozen 2, for example, teach a valuable lesson about the duties that come with privilege, especially privilege born out of past societal injustice (a lesson driven home even deeper by Thor: Ragnorak a few years later, as my colleague at Liberal Currents Paul Crider points out). Again, however, the preponderance of such stories builds a certain air of conservatism, where each individual has an assigned duty they must live up to, and little room is left for those whom Frederick Douglass calls self-made men, “who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results.” Disney nearly had such a character with the penultimate Star Wars film, but in the final installment made Rey yet another hero born to a powerful bloodline.
Asha, the protagonist of Wish, breaks both molds. She has no particular duty to either preserve or challenge the status quo by nature of her birth or position in society, but rather chooses from her humble circumstances (we see the inside of her house to be nothign particularly special) not to participate in a system she sees as wrong, and then ultimately works to undercut it. There is some supernatural intervention - in the form of a wish-granting star arriving from the heavens to get the plot going - but this is notably a specific request Asha made. Asha exists - and then chooses what her essence will be. Asha views the system - and rejects it. In this she is a revolutionarily liberal character the likes of which Disney has rarely created.
Rejecting the Leviathan
In the island kingdom of Rosas, where the film is set, there is a certain social contract. The king, Magnifico, has a unique ability to extract from individuals their ‘wishes’ - desires of their hearts, formed, apparently, as late teenagers. Absent these wishes, people are somewhat less animated and excited about life than they might otherwise be, but they are safe. And all is not lost - Magnifico periodically grants pre-screened wishes to lucky islanders, to great fanfare.
The system is perfectly Hobbesian - the single powerful ruler ensures the protection of all his subjects and allows them many rights, so long as they abide by the rules of the kingdom and sacrifice an important part of their individual wills. And there are several people on the island who absolutely accept this contract - indeed, the vast majority of residents do so without question when they give up their wishes. Many, like Magnifico himself, seem to have come to the kingdom as a place of sanctuary, and are perhaps willing to submit primarily because they want to avoid reliving the traumas that drove them there - the instinct is a relatable one and observable in the world.
Asha rejects this paternalism, however. She shuns the opportunity to become Magnifico’s assistant and seeks to give wishes back to her mother and grandfather - wishes Magnifico refuses to grant. She understands, in other words, LT Hobhouse’s description of a typical liberal:
“He is quite sure that he cannot manage the lives of other people for them. He finds it enough to manage his own. But with the leave of the Superior he would rather do this in his own way than in the way of another, whose way may be much wiser but is not his.”
Magnifico promises safety through careful management of the people’s hopes and dreams - Asha and her friends reject the premise, even if it introduces an element of chaos and potential danger into their island life. And when this anti-Hobbesian viewpoint runs up against Magnifico’s increasing repression, her and her youthful friends - those who have not yet given up their wishes - arrive at the liberal justification for revolution, their own personal 1688.
Balancing the individual and the community
Finally, the film’s climax manages to reconcile what appear initially to be paradoxical positions within liberalism - the primacy placed on individuality and the importance of community action. Hobhouse continues:
With this unregenerate Adam in him, I fear that the Liberalism that is also within him is quite ready to make terms. Indeed, it incites him to go still further. It bids him consider that other men are, on the whole, very like himself and look on life in much the same way, and when it speaks within him of social duty it encourages him to aim not at a position of superiority which will enable him to govern his fellow creatures for their own good, but at a spirit of comradeship in which he will stand shoulder to shoulder with them on behalf of common aims.
The great difficulty of liberalism is perhaps right here - that it asks individuals are united by their own uniqueness. Surely, it is easier to achieve such unity in sameness, in what a people have in common, in a universal desire - the desire, for example, for safety? But Wish sets ups a visual, metaphysical metaphor for exactly this: in the final confrontation with Magnifico, who holds all their wishes hostage above them, the people sing in unison to break his spell. Each has a different wish they seek to achieve - and who knows, many of those wishes are contradictory with one another! - but all are united in their desire to express their individual goals and aspirations, and let their neighbors do the same. This is the essence of liberal pluralism, probably harder to achieve in reality than on screen. But the depiction of it on screen is refreshing.
It may not have been a box office success, but Wish is philosophically worth a closer look. It’s uniquely self-motivated protagonist and her quest to reform society is highly unusual for any children’s film. The theme is fundamentally one of stability and control against individual aspiration, with the liberal ideals coming out on top. And it manages to depict brilliantly the balance between individual freedoms and the need for solidarity in civil society that forms the crux of liberal movements. In its now century long history, Disney has rarely made a film so openly and intelligently liberal, in the best sense.