I’ve said this a few times now, but Toy Story 3 represented a turning point in Pixar’s history. After that crowning achievement, Disney Animation poached much of Pixar’s creative talent. Pixar fell into the sequel game, Disney opened Wreck-It-Ralph and Frozen, and Pixar’s once great animated storytelling lead was overtaken. Though occasionally you get a Coco or Inside Out, more of Pixar’s offerings look like Onward: they’re competently made and really fun, but lack that depth and brilliance of their earlier efforts.
Onward’s world is a world that used to be magical, but technology’s ease changed the world into a fairy tale version of the modern world. Barley Lightfoot (Chris Pratt), the son of a deceased wizard, hopes for the old days to return, but his younger brother Ian (Tom Holland) is too busy teenage worrying (making friends, learning to drive, etc) to care about that. On his 16th birthday, Ian receives a gift from his deceased dad he’s never met: a magic staff and a spell that can bring dad back for 1 day. Ian casts the spell, but it only half works: dad’s legs are brought back, but that’s it. So Barley and Ian go on a quest to obtain the necessary magical power to finish the spell, then Barley can reconnect with dad and Ian can finally meet him.
For Pixar, Onward is merely ho hum. But as a movie in general, Onward is a delight. The backstory is done efficiently and quickly, setting up the amusing ironies of a real world filled with magical looking creatures: unicorns as raccoons, a gang of biker fairies, police centaurs, etc. The setup is wonderfully zany: 2 teens and a pair of legs go on a quest. There’s also a cute little side story Ian and Barley’s mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and a beast called the Manticore (Octavia Spencer) having the fantastical version of a mom’s night out. Each little challenge along the quest gives moments of humor, wonder, and moments for the animators to use their full imagination, with more payoffs than swings and misses.
What makes a Pixar movie special is the well of thematic and emotional heft in their films, working across multiple levels of storytelling. Onward doesn’t contain the wells of emotion, but the emotional heft is simple and very powerful, if my theater was any indication. Read: my theater = my heart. The brotherly connection between Ian and Barley makes Onward worthwhile. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before: Ian is the shy nervous one with a heap of talent, and Barley is the confident but maybe dimmer older brother, pushing Ian to understand how great he is. The real life quest doubles as an emotional endurance test for the two, which won’t surprise you probably until the third act, which hit me a lot harder than I thought it was going to. Having a younger brother certainly helped me here, but it should be affecting for everyone.
2020 is hopefully gonna be a big year for Pixar. Onward feels like chicken noodle soup on a cold winter’s day, wetting our appetites for the main course, Soul, directed by Inside Out‘s Pete Docter. And for all you little brothers out there, know that you’ve got the stuff, and I believe in you.
PS: Pixar, if you can promise you’ll continue partnering with the great Simpsons writers on shorts as fun as the one before Onward, I promise to boost my score of this film…