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rudnitskaia · 2 months

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Just finished to watch Wish. Have thoughts. A lot of.

Actually, I have a lot of not-so-pleasant thoughts about the modern scriptwriting in general, and for a long while already, but Wish made me sigh so incredibly deeply that I woke up my cat. The concept of Wish is wonderful, brilliant even. But in my opinion, unfortunately, it wasn't developed right. At all.

So, I decided to share my usual mental gymnastics in fixing the script. It's only my personal try, nothing else.

There's a very wordy text under the cut.

I warned you. Very. Wordy.

For the start, in the original script there was no motivation for Magnifico to become a villain. His ability to make EVERY wish come true ANYTIME is a HUGE hole in the plot. Instead, the gaining of this ability must have been Magnifico's main motivation. It immediately sets the conflict with the Star, who has such an ability, but uses it improperly (in Magnifico's opinion).

At the same time, make Magnifico the man who will be extremely dutiful and tired ALREADY in the beginning of the story. A wizard who lost everything once and wants to build a safe haven full of happiness for everyone so desperately that it twisted his nature.

Don't make the main problem in him taking away others' wishes. Set the main problem in Magnifico's twisted rationality and the fact that the weight of responsibility broke him. Remember this passage: this will be important later. For that let me slightly change the concept: instead of Magnifico's rule of taking away the wishes to set the rule of forbidding to tell it aloud to anyone except the King of Rosas himself. It also gives us a wonderful parallel with the “wish upon a star” concept, a wish that you should make silently and not tell anyone after that or it won't come true. Like, if you live in that country and tell the wish to Magnifico, it casts a spell on you that forbids you to talk about the wish. It's explained by the fact that it forms a bond between the wish maker and the wizard, and that bond is the seal for magic to work, since the creative source of the wish itself gives the wizard the power to fulfil it. But Magnifico can fulfil only one wish at a time and it takes a lot of his own magical powers/lifetime/[insert any other difficult ritual], so people must wait in line. Simple. Sets the logical boundaries to his powers and explains why there’s a rule of “one wish per person”. Optionally, maybe there can also be Genie-like rules of “no wishes to make someone to fall in love or to be killed/revived” etc. People can come to the King and change their wish if they want, they can still make attempts to make other wishes come true if they want, but they're just happy with the fact that if they wait in line long enough someday their dream will be fulfilled with a 100% chance without ANY effort. So why bother?

Make Asha Magnifico's dutiful apprentice for a while, a year or two, already at the beginning of the movie. Give her some magical powers and make her struggle with the fact that Magnifico can't fulfil any wish at any time, too, make her desperately wanting to fulfil every wish without waiting for that for a long period of time. She helps people, she's in contact with them, she gives them minor magical things daily, like to help someone with gardening or wiping away dust with magical broom. But she wants more. She wants to be as powerful as Magnifico and to serve people. And her curiosity when she searches for a way to gain powers to fulfil any wish, her desperate desire to make all people in the Kingdom of Rosas happy summons the Star, who can't go back to the sky until he fulfils Asha's wish.

Show us the Star as a carefree eternal being; a trickster because of their lighthearted attitude. I saw the concept arts for Wish where the Star was a “Jack Frost”-type young man, and still think that's a pity they changed it. I get that by such a change scriptwriters eliminated the romantic subplot with Asha, but I guess many would be much more intrigued with the silent young man who's curious to everything around him and isn't attached to the real life on Earth due to his god-like nature. So, further I'll refer to the Star as a young man.

Asha truly believes that fulfilment of her wish can be reached only if the Star fulfils all the wishes of people in the Kingdom of Rosas. And the Star truly carelessly fulfils any wish of anyone he meets on the streets, and so far, we see a good fella in him. But soon enough Asha and the Star see the consequences of their wish-fulfilment raid. In a short while people seem not so happy. The people of the Kingdom of Rosas start to suffer with jealousy to each other, start to become greedy. For example, there were two guys who wanted to become the best bakers of all, and they become ones, which causes them argue and ruins their friendship, since there can't be two "the best of the best". Others start to fight, to be anxious about their own wishes, to constantly ask for more and more in a way of “they have it and I want it, too!”, and so forth. The more wishes are fulfilled without any effort, the more people wish for. And such scenarios are everywhere. Literal chaos on the streets.

Moreover, the “fulfilment” of Asha’s wish seems to not help the Star to return home. That's why Asha goes to Magnifico in search for his wisdom and help and acquaints him and the Star fella. Magnifico convinces Asha and the Star that everything can be fixed.

With the Star’s help he performs his magic and makes people of Rosas to forget their wishes, returning them to their “normal state”. That's when we and Asha will accidentally know that Magnifico's rule not to tell anyone but himself about the wishes was because he didn't fulfil the real wishes: using the power of the wish he fulfilled something that he considered safe instead that won't harm anybody and made those people forget that they wished for something else. Asha is horrified by the revelation, at which Magnifico tells her that this is the necessity and the ruler's duty, since wishes can be dangerous and controversial, just as he does in the real animated movie, but now with the evidence that Asha sees herself on the streets. People fight with each other and wish each other bad things. Some could wish to destroy the country. Some could wish to harm someone. Moreover, wishes can argue with each other, just as it happened with those two bakers before. Someone will inevitably be miserable in the end. And the only way to prevent that chaos, to make everyone truly happy, is to make the fulfilment of the wishes controllable.

Asha is utterly broken, thinking that maybe Magnifico is right. Maybe it is better for people to live in a happy controlled oblivion. She leaves the Star with Magnifico, telling the Star to listen to Magnifico since he knows better how to make everyone happy, and walks away.

Meanwhile Magnifico goes through his final arc. What happened on the streets because of Asha and the Star makes him remember how he lost everything in his childhood because of some intruders, and gets the horrifying idea to make the whole world similar to the Kingdom of Rosas. So, he finally decides to take away the Star’s power. Magnifico convinces the Star that he can arrange a magical ritual: that a spell can create a portal in a magical mirror that reflects the sky on a sunset, and that portal will lead the Star home. The Star asks (in gestures) to invite all the people to see him depart, since he got attached to them. Magnifico agrees to that, since no one will suspect that the Star will vanish and not depart.

That's how we get a villain with a God complex: a villain whose greatest desire is to make everyone happy, but in a way he sees happiness himself. Good intention at the beginning, that was awfully twisted. But it's a real motivation. That's why he wants to take away the Star's power. He wants to make everyone in the world happy. In exchange for their free will.

To make everything what I stated above work properly there must be ONE supporting character who silently works to fulfil their dream themselves during the whole movie. And they become the one who'll tell Asha: “I can make it on my own. I don't need any miracles. What's entertaining in gaining what I wish for so easily? Will it be a wish if I get it so easy? It gives my life the sense, the taste; the goal is good, but the way itself is as much valuable. The small help you and my family gave me, Asha, was enough.”

And for Asha, suddenly, it clicks. She understands that people don't need all of their wishes to be immediately fulfilled. They just need to have some support on the way. To share their wishes. To be together through thick and thin. That’s the happiness. That’s what was wrong with fulfilling her wish and why it didn’t help the Star to return home. She gains information from the supporting character about the ritual on the square and rushes back to Magnifico's castle, since she is Magnifico’s apprentice and she knows that the ritual with the mirror is not what it’s seems. It's the evil magic. The one who charmed the mirror gets all the magical powers of the one reflected in it, and the reflected person will be trapped in the mirror forever until the death of the mirror’s creator.

That sets “the final fight”. Asha runs to the square in front of the castle and stops ritual. She reveals what Magnifico was about to do and what Magnifico did the whole time with controlling their wishes. She tells them a heartfelt speech about her revelation of true happiness and asks people how many times they wanted to share with each other what they wanted the most, but were supposed to stay silent, how many things they could have done together, but didn’t because they simply waited for the wish to come true in complete lonesome instead of making memories on the way to fulfil it themselves. No one believes her, since everyone loves Magnifico, but the Star opens the hearts of the people, making everyone’s wishes visible, and everyone see their own wishes and Magnifico’s cruel wish, too. Frightened with the rebellious crowd, Magnifico quickly sets a magical barrier and tries to finish the spell he started to perform to take away the Star’s powers, but Asha interrupts and turns the mirror to reflect in it Magnifico himself on the last words he says.

Magnifico becomes trapped in the mirror (yeah, yeah, I preserved that reference :D). The Star grants Asha with access to his powers through the magic wand, showing her that he trusts her and believes that she’s the golden middle between careless himself and “the control freak” Magnifico. That she has wisdom “to give people the rod and teach how to use it”. Then the Star can either stay on Earth, because he simply enjoyed the life there, or walk away to the sky. Optionally, with Asha herself. The End.

All of that sets the main idea and the final moral: there are good wishes and bad ones. Not every wish can come true. You must work hard yourself to make your wish come true, and the harder you work, the more valuable the result is to you. The true happiness is not only the final destination, but a journey to it through the life itself. And no matter what, there's always a place for a miracle, even a small one.

If you read it to the end, first of all, WOWIE, THANK YOU 😳, and second of all, sorry, it was truly wordy. It's just... I don't tell what I wrote is flawless, but at least I tried to do my best to fix the literal holes, eliminate lack of characters' motivation and make the characters work for the story, because God knows how tired I am to see good-but-underdeveloped concepts in the modern media.

I wish it changes someday.

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