Onward!

This past Sunday, the fam and I ventured forth from the Fortress of Ineptitude to see the newest movie from Pixar.

Onward is set in a world where mythical creatures like elves, centaurs and such are the dominant life on Earth but they have evolved to a state not unlike regular old humans with a total reliance on modern technology.

It is a world that was once filled with magic but it is a magic few remember except in stories and games.

It is in this world that we meet Ian, a tall lanky boy who has just turned 16.  Ian is introverted and social awkward, unlike his older brother Barley who is big and brash, someone who longs for the life of the ancient days of magic and adventurous derring do as recounted through role playing games.  Their father died of a terrible illness many year ago. Ian and Barley’s mother gives them a gift from their father to be presented when Ian turned 16.

It’s a wizard’s staff! And it comes with a spell that will restore their dad to life for one day.  Barley can’t make the staff work buy it turns out Ian is the one adept at magic but not enough to make the spell work perfectly. Dad’s return stops at his brown loafers, purple socks and khaki slacks before the staff’s power source, the Phoenix stone, goes ka-blooey.  The spell once begun means the clock is ticking and the boys only have a days to figure out how to completely restore their dad before his day on Earth is up.

Barley’s knowledge of role playing games gives him an answer as to where they might find another Phoenix stone. And thus Barley and Ian (and dad’s legs) are off on a quest. 

I’ve seen some criticism of Onward going to the off visited well of the dead parent trope so often employed in Disney movies.  But I think that such a critique is unfounded here. Yes, there are lots of animated films (Disney and not Disney) where principal characters have 1 or both parents dead.  But usually the parent or parents being dead is device to leave characters free from parental oversight, to accentuate a loner status. The dead parent is a plot device designed to help move things along.

In Onward, the dead parent is crucial to the story and to the character development of our protagonists.  Ian and Barley are extremely different from each other but both brothers have trauma connected to the death of their father. Ian has no memories of his father with 16 years gone without a father. Ian has the trauma of not knowing his dad. He is obsessed with all that he’s missing in his life such as confidence and friends as well as missing an entire childhood without a father.

Barley does have memories of his dad. At first he says he has three key memories of their father, which are all happy. Then he mentions a fourth memory that is not happy. It’s the day their dad died, all hooked up to tubes and wires that could not longer keep him alive. Barley was supposed to say goodbye to him but he could not bear to see his father like that so he didn’t.

Up until this point, Barley’s treated their quest for a new Phoenix stone as some grand fulfillment of his life long desire to go on a magical quest filled with adventure. But we see that Barley has his own trauma, of missing his dad and not being there for him when he died.

It’s pretty heady stuff yielding some powerful emotional beats.

Besides the two brothers’ quest to finish the spell so they can speak to their dad, there are moments of adventure, action and humor as one would expect to find in a Pixar movie.

But something I just can’t put my finger on left me feeling empty. The strong emotional subject matter at the core of Onward and the weird world it takes place in did not resonate with me as I might have expected. There’s an emotional heft that I felt in movies like Inside Out, Up, and Coco that is oddly missing here. Why that is, I’m not sure.

Onward is a good movie. I enjoyed it and I would recommend it. It feels a bit short of being a great movie.  

One last word. The short before Onward is not from Pixar but is a Simpson short, "Playdate With Destiny", a wordless slice of life with baby Maggie. It's still a bit weird to see something like the Simpsons linked to Disney but if you're going to have a short in front of a Pixar movie that is not also from Pixar, "Playdate With Destiny" is thematically similar enough to fit in tone to not be completely out of place.  

Randie thinks there's a special place in hell for people who put non-Pixar shorts in front of Pixar movies.