Onward
ONWARD - DISNEY
There’s a certain cadence to recent Pixar movies that audiences have come to expect. It starts with a quirky original short and segues into a main feature set in a unique world, full of memorable characters, usually ending with a real tearjerker finale: see Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 4 for reference. Sure, there are films that buck the trend, like the exceedingly middling Incredibles 2 and the entire Cars franchise, but for the most part, a viewer can sit comfortably in the knowledge that there’s a certain amount of quality control that comes with the Pixar territory.
Fortunately, the latest film in the canon immediately lets audiences in on the fact that Onward is different and – spoiler alert – worse. Instead of being greeted with a one-off short about some adorable animal, the corporate synergism of The Walt Disney Company forces viewers to sit through an obvious advertisement for Disney+, in the form of a mediocre The Simpsons interstitial. Yes, the Mouse now owns animation’s most famous family and they’re not gping to let anyone forget it. It’s a blatant acknowledgement of consumerism that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the viewers. It is not too dissimilar to the overly long Frozen short that infuriated Coco audiences in 2017. However, this time things don’t pick up once the Pixar logo plays.
The world of Onward is relatively simple. In a land full of elves, dragons and unicorns, modernity has hit hard. Magic takes too much time and effort to learn, leading all users to abandon their powers for the comfort of technology, so much so that the concept of magic has been almost entirely forgotten. It is not clear what the one-to-one ratioor this metaphor would be in our lives, so whatever point the writers are trying to make, beyond their point of ‘technology = bad’, is lost. This conceit is further muddled by the main plot of the film.
Ian and Barley Lightfoot (Tom Holland and Chris Pratt) have a dead dad. Onward spends the entire first act drilling that point home. Everything about either of their personalities leads back to this fact. Ian can’t make friends at school? It’s because his dad’s dead. Barley won’t start his career? It’s because his dad’s dead. It really cannot be overstated how dead their dad is.
On Ian’s sixteenth birthday, however, their mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gives the boys one final gift from their aforementioned dead dad: a wizard’s staff complete with instructions on how to bring their dead dad back to life for one day. Along with this comes an exceedingly rare Phoenix gem needed for the spell to work. Barley, a magic and lore enthusiast, attempts to use the staff and gem, but is unable to as he does not have “the gift” of magic.
It is baffling how this all disregards the world-building that has just been set up. If rare gems and magical staffs are needed to make spells work, then the transition to technology seems to be more of an accessibility issue than anything related to laziness. Likewise, if only certain people are predisposed to have “the gift”, it seems like an over-simplification to blame society for creating their own science-based comforts when the alternative is being beholden to an elite class that are born privileged.
And as luck would have it, Ian just happens to be one of those with magical abilities, which is lucky for dear old dead dad, otherwise his gift would have just been an old stick and a rock. As Ian is not trained in magic whatsoever, the spell fails, the Phoenix gem explodes, and only their dad’s legs and crotch are brought back. Barley and Ian realise they only have 24 hours to find another Phoenix gem. They make sure, however, to spend a few precious moments with the top part of their dad.
Having just this little bit of knowledge, nearly every viewer can surmise how this film ends and, almost shockingly, director Dan Scanlon doesn’t have any additional tricks up his sleeve. The rest of the movie just plays out like a paint-by-numbers road trip and hits every beat one would expect. The trio have run-ins with bikers and their mum’s cop boyfriend. There is a pandering LGBT representation in the form of a lesbian cyclops (Lena Waithe). There is only one moment that brought any true joy throughout the entire slog and it was a visual gag relating to the final villain. Even that was quickly overused until the joke was no longer clever.
The other thing very un-Pixar about this whole experience is how truly uninspired the character design is. The Lightfoot family look closer to the designs of a low-budget Disney Animation project and the supporting cast are uniformly derivative from other fantasy films. In fact, a large number of characters look like rejects from Monsters Inc. The costume choices are bizarre as well. They’re all wearing pretty bland modern clothes. It doesn’t seem likely that even fans of the movie would be running out to buy Ian & Barley’s Funko POP! figures.
All in all, Onward is just the latest in Pixar’s slow decline towards mediocrity. It’s a fine movie to put on when it reaches Disney+, but there is no reason at all to head to the theatres to see it. Ironically, a film that revolves around magic disappearing from the world is also the film that implies it has gone from Pixar too.
ONWARD is released March 6th 2020
