Desire, the 62nd film released by Walt Disney Animation Studios, is a bad movie. The film is intended to celebrate the studio’s 100th anniversary, but instead its rambling story and reliance on millennial clichés for cheap jokes feels like it’s been fed into an AI generator and spat out onto the big screen. And the music, which is always a staple of Disney movies, is there some really great pieces which are unfortunately weighed down by terrible lyrics.
in general Desire it’s a hot mess but for Kingdom Hearts fans, its basic premise could have significant implications for Disney’s Square Enix and Final Fantasy crossover – that is, when Tetsuya Nomura and friends decided to include it in the future Kingdom Hearts games.
![Image for an article titled Wish for a new Disney movie could have big implications for Kingdom Hearts](https://i.kinja-img.com/image/upload/c_fit, q_60, w_645/afpvuwnfoibrncd6upmy.jpg)
What Desire about?
Desire takes place in the kingdom of Rosas, where King Magnifico, a sorcerer with the power to grant wishes granted to him by commoners, stores wishes in the form of magic orbs and refuses to grant those he doesn’t believe will benefit the kingdom. When a citizen turns 18, they convey to Magnifico their wish to be “hidden” in his office until the day he chooses to fulfill it. Although he may believe himself to be just, as the protagonist Asha points out, Magnifico has created a system in which he controls the fate of everyone in Rosas, making the townspeople hopeless while they wait for their wishes to be fulfilled. As the film progresses, the king’s true nature as a selfish bastard becomes apparent, and Asha leads a rebellion against his tyranny.
But what is it connected with Kingdom Hearts? As Asha learns more about the wishes in Magnifico’s clutches, it becomes clear that some of those wishes are connected to the events leading up to the various Disney films. One civilian Rosas wants to fly, wears a green tunic and is called Peter Peter Pan. Valentina, Asha’s pet goat who gained the ability to speak through magical shenanigans, wishes for a place where all mammals live equally, referencing 2016’s idyllic vision External device. Asha herself becomes the Fairy Godmother and wears a cloak similar to the character from Cinderella.
There are other references, such as Asha’s group of friends who dress and act like the Seven Dwarfs from Snow white. And when Magnifico is defeated, he falls into the mirror, effectively becoming the Magic Mirror from the same movie. There’s even a split-second shot in which his face is outlined to resemble the mask that inhabits the mirror in the 1937 film.
What does Desire means for Kingdom HeartsDisney universe?
All of this (and 90 minutes of other Disney movie references) is part of the goal Desire— to celebrate Disney history — but there’s a more serious implication here: Rosas is the center of Disney’s connected universe. According to directors Chris Buck and Fawn Wirsanthorne and co-writer Jennifer Lee, Desire not anchored as a launch pad for the multiverse, but it has characters like Peter Pan, places like Zootopia, and songs like “When You Wish Upon A Star” are the dreams of Rosas residents. Before that, Disney showed the occasional crossover, e.g Frozen featuring characters from Confused in a crowd shot that Disney mostly acknowledged with cute nods. But Desire creates an entire plot of Disney’s most beloved characters and worlds that originated in his kingdom.
This raises the question of how this world will function in the future Kingdom Hearts‘ crossover. Will Kingdom Hearts play with abstract ideas Desire hints at? In the RPG series from Square Enix, the protagonist Sora and his friends Donald and Goofy travel through different Disney worlds in a spaceship. But before these worlds were divided, they took place from the Scala ad Caelum, which occupied a great place in Kingdom Hearts Union χ and in the final section of Art Kingdom Hearts III.
![Stairway to heaven work](https://i.kinja-img.com/image/upload/c_fit,q_60,w_645/69578af5108d4f8f25047222cf4f2e46.jpg)
Inclusion Desire and Rosas st Kingdom HeartsThe world is going to need a lot of rearmament as Square Enix has been creating its own related lore for 20 years now. It is not clear whether even this will have to be reckoned with in the near future Kingdom Hearts IV was developed simultaneously with the film and Disney started work on Desire in 2018a year ago Kingdom Hearts III launched. While we don’t know which Disney worlds will appear in the next game, we can reasonably assume that Disney and Square have been talking about Kingdom Hearts IV for now Desire was in production.
Kingdom Hearts has released many prequels and midquels between its numbered entries that help recontextualize story beats or fill in gaps, but Scala ad Caelum’s place as the root Kingdom Hearts‘ The Disney crossover has proven itself quite well. So it might be easier for Square Enix to ignore Rosas and DesireThe Disney Cinematic Universe in its entirety. That said, the series isn’t used to setting up characters, worlds, and relationships to fit its own narrative. In addition to weaving the existence of the shadowy nemesis Heartless into the plots of the Disney films, Kingdom Hearts continues to compose new films in his narrative.
The first game turned the Seven Princesses of Hearts (including Alice, Snow White, Jasmine, Belle, Cinderella, and Aurora) into a single magical force that affected all known Kingdom Hearts universe Kingdom Hearts III made sure to add newcomers Rapunzel, Anna, and Elsa to the New Seven Hearts set to take up the mantle. So Rosas could actually be shaped to fit the needs of a new story arc – perhaps a point of departure for the new worlds Sora will explore Kingdom Hearts IVfurther explaining the expansion of knowledge without stepping on the toes of the story told earlier in the series.
![Sora, Donald and Goofy stand under the pink sky of Arendelle.](https://i.kinja-img.com/image/upload/c_fit,q_60,w_645/58051c3169b6a993768dc17824b7e5c6.jpg)
Desire attempts of what Kingdom Hearts made over 20 years ago
Kingdom HeartsThe interconnected Disney universe was a fairly new idea back in 2002 when the first game was released. But nowadays, crossovers are so common that the returns from them are getting smaller and smaller. Take a look at the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe box office and you’ll find that people are less enamored with the concept that everything they watch and play is intertwined with each other. The shared Disney universe is a major theme in new games like Disney’s Dreamlight Valley and Disney mirrorbut Kingdom Hearts it’s one of the few examples where these worlds are cleverly woven into each other, rather than lumped together in a disjointed pocket dimension. Now this Desire at least plays with the idea of Rosas as a source of characters and ideas in previous Disney films, Kingdom Hearts is in an interesting position. He should either consider one of the movies where he can be shown eating his dinner — at least with his hands instead of a perfectly good fork and knife and just generally making a mess of the table — or find a way to get out of the bind. place the series.
I wonder if, considering Desire‘s average reception and box office figures, Square Enix might as well not touch the film or its characters at all, as that would complicate things in ways that probably aren’t worth the trouble. But Kingdom Hearts has included some Disney movies in his games somehow, so who knows? yeah i’m looking at you Chicken Little. In the meantime, let’s hope that whatever Disney has in store for 2024 doesn’t read like ChatGPT wrote it.