Disney told Julia Michaels to “just do you.” Which, as mandates go, sits somewhere between “follow your bliss” and “good luck storming the castle.” It’s also not the sentence you expect from the director of a century-marking animated musical when they're trusting you with the 100th-anniversary movie. But that’s where Michaels and longtime collaborator Ben Rice found themselves: mid-pandemic, stuck at home, writing songs about hope for characters who don’t technically exist yet.
“It was still very surreal. Not even a little bit normal,” Michaels says, laughing in that way people do when the alternative is to faint.
Their road to Wish actually begins back in 2016, when Michaels declared herself a Disney lifer to then-music-supervisor Tom MacDougall. That turned into a slot on Ralph Breaks the Internet—specifically the delightfully unhinged “Slaughter Race."
Then, during the pandemic, MacDougall—now elevated to “President of All Things You’ve Loved Since Childhood”—called with a mystery synopsis. Magical kingdom. Handsome king. Big betrayal. Girl steals back everyone’s wishes. “I was so inspired by that,” Michaels says. “I missed my friends. I missed hope.” She pitched one song, sent it off, waited… and got the call. “It’s yours.” Just like that. No pressure.
Immediately she dialed Ben Rice. “Do you want to make a movie with me?” she asked, as if this were a low-stakes coffee run instead of Disney canon. Rice says he didn’t even need to pretend to think about it.
But writing for someone else’s characters—plural characters—meant tossing out the usual Michaels-isms. “Working with Julia for nearly ten years, it’s always her voice,” Rice says. “This was the opposite. These weren’t our stories.” Instead of therapy-by-melody, it was world-building-by-spreadsheet.
Literally. “We had a spreadsheet of plants and animals,” Michaels says. “It ended up being 36 voices on ‘I’m a Star.’ We had to cast the turtle.” Not a metaphor.
That song, one of the movie’s unexpected highs, started as a Jennifer Lee directive: write something scientific, playful, philosophical, and emotionally devastating—in under four minutes. Also, every organism in the kingdom has to sing it. “I’ve only ever written for one person or a duet,” Michaels says. “Never 36.” She and Rice recorded the demo themselves, taking turns pretending to be porcupines and hedges. From there, the job became finding the right humans to embody each flora and fauna. “That was the fun part,” Rice says. “The hard work was done. Now we got to cast trees.”
Even the human characters came alive in ways they didn’t expect. Chris Pine—yes, Captain Kirk, but make it malevolent monarch—recorded his villain vocals under their guidance. Ariana DeBose brought the protagonist’s blend of earnestness and grit. And Michaels and Rice were in every single session, making sure the bones of the demos survived. “Addicting,” she admits. “Having a whole cast sing your every note? Yeah.”
Then there was Dave Metzger, who handled the orchestral scoring. “We’d leave space in the demos and go, ‘Oh, strings would be beautiful here,’” Michaels says. Metzger didn’t just add strings—he detonated them. “He was like a kid in a candy store,” Rice says, recalling the 80-piece orchestra session where Metzger looked blissed out on pure musical sugar.
It’s easy to forget Wish is a first for both of them: first full soundtrack, first time juggling multiple character perspectives, first time ensuring a porcupine’s emotional arc tracks scene-to-scene. It didn’t just stretch them—it detonated whatever ceiling they thought they had.
“It showed me I can access more than I thought I could,” Michaels says. She jokes that her solo work is “like coconut water—an acquired taste,” but the process here let her go maximal: bigger cadences, weird tempos, vocabulary pilfered from astronomy and rebellion. “Chris Buck said, ‘Just make a Disney movie in your tone of voice,’ and that felt very freeing.”
Michaels won’t publicly confirm what she’s doing next, but she’s writing, always writing. And Rice is not done making movies with her. Not even close.
“I just want to do more of this,” she says. “We want to do more of this.”
If Disney asks, the answer is already yes.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
