In Wicked's Oz, private vehicles trump mass transit—unlike real cities
The new Wicked film imagines a world of gondolas and personal boats, not trains. But real Toronto and Vancouver show what collective solutions can actually build.
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Wicked: For Good opens with beasts of burden straining under roadbuilding contraption as yellow bricks clunk into place. When a foreman whips the creatures, Elphaba swoops in on her broom to defend them. The camera lingers on what follows: personal vehicles everywhere. Students arrive at Shiz University in single-family gondolas. Glinda glides toward campus on a boat piled high with luggage. When she steps ashore, the docks are covered with other students' trunks.
Later, the train from Shiz to the Emerald City carries so few passengers it reads like "a glorified green limo." University students crowd the platform, but only one is meant to board. No one gets off. There's no visible luggage, no passengers searching for seats or jostling suitcases—the mundane reality of actual transit travel.
Compare this to another fantastical film. Spirited Away, the Japanese animated movie, shows other passengers throughout the protagonist's train journey. Shadowy figures shift to retrieve bags, then get off at various stops. The film normalizes mass transit by depicting the ordinary actions of anonymous riders. Wicked subverts those possibilities by framing rail travel as a luxury good for the select few.
Other fictional train journeys have encouraged readers to imagine joining the crowd. Generations of Harry Potter fans have posed for photos at platform 9¾. Paddington has been immortalized in bronze at the London station that shares his name. Although Wicked was filmed in England, it doesn't celebrate the energy and emotion of transit hubs the way these British stories do. The Oz that director Jon M. Chu built—with sets constructed by hand rather than computer graphics—simply does not prioritize moving residents at scale.
The decision is surprising given how much attention the filmmakers lavished on other fantastical elements: rustic Munchkinland houses contrasting with the Emerald City's urban flair, spinning circular bookcases adding magic to Shiz University study sessions. "If you want to be inside that world, you gotta build it," Chu explained. Yet when it came to how that world moves, the choice was clear: private over collective. In real cities—Toronto, Vancouver, any place serious about its future—the opposite instinct takes hold.
The facts
What vehicles do students use to arrive at Shiz University in Wicked?
Students arrive at Shiz University in single-family gondolas. Glinda also glides toward campus on a boat piled high with luggage, and the docks are covered with other students' trunks.
How many passengers board the train from Shiz to the Emerald City in Wicked?
Only one student is meant to board the train from Shiz to the Emerald City, despite a crowd of university students on the platform.
