A couple of days ago, I watched Disney-Pixar's latest, humiliating failure. The previous animated film, Strange World, was pretty, but merely predictable and uninspired. What set Wish apart was that it was both, but also a strange deconstruction of the Walt Disney myth. The background is a bit complicated in that there is a lot of magical hocus-pocus going on that have to be explained to make any sense, but none of that really matters. A perky young girl works in the palace's kitchen and hopes to be granted a wish for her grandfather. Instead, she is invited to become the magical king's apprentice. It is he that makes the wishes come true. But as the girl learns more, she realizes that the king doesn't grant wishes, but takes them when the wish is made, ostensibly to protect the wish from using it badly. The wish is then kept in a glass sphere with the other hundreds of wishes, and the wishers lose their hopes and dreams instead. Somehow, nobody seems to realize any of this, and think they are satisfied. The kitchen girl knows better now, and spills the beans. The king tries to hush the truth up and resorts to more and more drastic means to regain his complete control of everyone's wishes. Finally, he consults a book of forbidden magic and is sucked into outright evil. Meanwhile, a falling star makes friends with the kitchen girl, and takes the form of a ridiculous anime-like cutesy star that seems completely out of place in the story. Animals are given the power of speech for no good reason -- a plot element that could easily have been written out of the story. And there is an utterly pointless song and dance number just to appeal to those bloated, live-stage numbers some audiences like. There are a lot of in-jokes, such as a Peter Pan look-alike who wishes to fly, and -- when inevitably the wicked king-magician is defeated, he is imprisoned in a magic mirror! Complicated plot? Yes. But not much real story. Too much music, that showed-off the vocalists, but was completely forgettable. And then all those weird in-jokes... That's when it began to add up for me. The references were the tip-off. You are meant to remember the stand-out song of all time -- "When you wish upon a star", reprised from 1940! The king is a good-looking, mature man with a mustache who looks quite a bit like Walt Disney himself. He creates a magical kingdom of which he is the absolute ruler, and whose power is to steal dreams to own for himself. In the end, he is trapped forever in an instrument for telling lies. "Wish" is no less than the Disney animation studios repudiating it's founder in a bizarre act of suicide! It goes without saying that the deposed king is succeeded by his queen and the kitchen girl is promoted to apprentice magician…