Disney Originally Considered Making ‘Wish’ 2D Animated?

With Disney celebrating their 100 years of existence the company is releasing their latest animated film Wish with the tagline “A Century in the making“.

The animated feature follows a 17-year-old girl named Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose), who is originally meant to be the apprentice of King Magnifico (voiced by Chris Pine). She discovers that through his powers to grant people’s wishes, he is selective in whose wishes are granted and sees him as power-hungry. When a new magic threatens the king’s rule, Asha must overcome the evils that control the kingdom. 

The art style for the film is CGI animated with a visual twist to help distinguish it from some of Disney’s other recent films like Encanto and Raya and the Last Dragon. The character models have a cell-shaded look to them and a saturated texture. Some may say that it feels like it is paying homage to the company’s older 2D films. However, we may have gotten something far closer to the older style than some might think.

In a recent interview with Jennifer Lee, the CCO of Walt Disney Animation Studios, as well as the executive producer and co-writer of Wish, she confirmed that in the early stages of development, they had considered making the movie 2D animated.



The reason for it being 2D would have been to reference the company’s long history with the style and would have been a return to a style the company hasn’t seen in over a decade. While many point to 2009’s The Princess and the Frog as their last major 2D film it was actually 2011’s Winnie the Pooh that was their last hand-drawn outing.

In an interview with IGN she stated:

“We did talk about it in the beginning, in multiple directions. It was interesting because when we first started thinking about it, we were just deciding. It wasn’t like ‘we can or can’t.’ It was just deciding, ‘Is that what we want to do’?“

However, she went on to explain that they ended up choosing GCI over hand-drawn due to it being easier and more realistic. She said:

“What happens in hand-drawn is that you have the incredible hand of the artist, but also limitations in what you could do on screen. What happened in CG is you’d have incredible, boundless opportunities, visually, that elevated it, even to the point for some, into realism, which is not what we wanted to do. The more important thing to us was to have a way to find technology that can do everything. Connect to the true vision of the artist, but bring in technology that could finally take away limitations.“

The whole hand-drawn vs. CGI subject is a heavily debated subject by many animation enthusiasts. Many argue that hand-drawn is able to capture expressions better and is less expensive than CGI, while others argue that CGI is easier to animate and takes less time to make.

(Video courtesy of Channel Awesome via YouTube)

In fact, Disney recently developed the animated short Once Upon A Studio, which combines both CGI and hand-drawn characters to celebrate the company’s 100 years.

While it is interesting to see a 3D animated film taking some visual flair from their past hand-drawn films, there is definitely a large number of fans who would have preferred a return to 2D. Perhaps making it 2D would have made it stand out more against other animated films.

What do you think? Were they right to move forward on making the film with 2D influences, or should they have gone the whole nine yards and made a new hand-drawn film?

Source: IGN