Shorts Review: Descendants: Wicked World – “Evie’s Explosion of Taste”

Back in July of this year, Disney released their latest direct-to-TV movie, Descendants. It told the story of the children of famous villains (Maleficent, Evil Queen, Cruella, and Jafar) as they moved from their wicked lives on the Isle of the Lost to a school filled with the children of the famous heroes (Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, Blue Fairy, and Sleeping Beauty). While it wasn’t a particularly good movie, the kids seemed to love it. As a result, we got an animated spin-off of the show titled Descendants: Wicked World.

In the first episode of the short, Evie (daughter of the Evil Queen) is trying to bake cupcakes for the school carnival. But she’s never actually baked cupcakes before. She figures that baking is basically chemistry so she puts all of the periodic table elements into the mix. The cupcakes come out awesome-looking (they change colors!), they aren’t exactly carnival fair. So Evie goes to Mal (daughter of Maleficent) for a spell to fix the treats. Begrudgingly, Mal helps her. Just as Mal begins the spell, Evie decides to take a bite of a cupcake. Realizing that they taste awful, she throws the rest of the cupcake out the tent door, interrupting Mal’s spell. Instead of turning the cakes into an explosion of taste, they just turn into an explosion…all over Audrey (daughter of Sleeping Beauty).

Even though this is a short, it was even shorter than most. It only ran for about two minutes total. While I suppose that was long enough to tell a blip of a story, there wasn’t any meat to it. We don’t see any of the carnival set up or any of the other characters. I guess I was expecting a little more “behind the scenes” characterization that we didn’t get from the live action movie. Instead, we just get a story best told to a diary. On the good side, Dove Cameron (Mal) and Sofia Carson (Evie) are both voicing the animated versions of their movie characters. At least there will be some consistency across the franchise.