When You Wish Upon a Star

Tom Hanks brings an unusual quality to this Disney standard — not the polish of a trained vocalist but the unguarded warmth of a particular kind of adult sincerity, the kind that exists past irony without ever having been cynical in the first place. Benjamin Evan Ainsworth's contribution carries the luminous, slightly tremulous quality of a child's voice that has not yet learned to protect itself, and the pairing of these two timbres — weathered and new, knowing and open — gives the recording a tenderness that the more technically accomplished versions sometimes miss. The arrangement is spare and traditional: strings that swell without overwhelming, piano that provides harmonic support without calling attention to itself, a tempo slow enough to feel like a genuine wish rather than a performance. The song itself is one of the oldest and most durable emotional technologies in popular culture — a melody structured around hope as physical act, the lifting of desire toward something external and possibly indifferent. In this context, from the 2022 live-action Pinocchio, it arrives laden with the accumulated weight of every prior version while also functioning simply as a father and son sharing something they both believe, for the duration of the song, might be true. You would find this most powerful at the specific intersection of childhood and adult retrospection: watching with a child, or alone remembering what it felt like to want something that badly.