Difficult for me to to make it through it and about half of my kids wanted to change to something else, but one or two wanted to at least see how things ended so we made it through to the end. Nobody has ever mentioned wanting to watch it a second time and I would have been irritated if I had paid to see it in the theatre. Since I was more or less forced to watch it, I'll give you my take on why it was so bad.

The film felt like Disney took a bunch of successful movies and had an AI produce the entire film by patching together aspects of the other successful films, but in ways that missed the mark.

The main character has the mannerisms of an awkward 15 year old girl (i.e. Mirabel/Moana), which was weird since she's 18 in this film.

The music was good but not great. There weren't any songs that stood out or were so catchy you loved them immediately and remembered them, like with Moana, Encanto or Frozen. So in the absence of outstanding music, it actually needed a plot to keep your interest (see plot problems below).

The plot made no sense at all. The villain chooses the main character as his sole assistant even though she basically sends several signals right away that she doesn't buy in to the entire system he has created, relies upon, and will do anything to protect. The villain's wife is portrayed as a good person that somehow knows everything about the way his system works, but doesn't see a problem with it at all until he uses dark magic from 'the restricted section" of his library (the magic he was already using to steal people's dreams to make himself more powerful was benevolent I guess???).

Then to add insult to injury, at the tail end of the movie they tried to make this new and very mediocre film the origin story for many of the disney classics (Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan). That felt completely forced and I don't think anybody who had suffered through this film was thinking to themselves they hoped it would gain more prominence as the origin story for the entire foundation of Disney animation. Who approved that decision?

Anyway, not a great film.