Onward - Review Thread

Pixar didn't make the short.

This landed on Disney+, maybe I'll give it a spin this weekend.

There are few annual certainties to look forward to in movies, where year after year a new release from a popular franchise or studio or even filmmaker or actor piques all of our interests and has us checking out the latest trailer. Pixar was certainly among the very few that could say that, building on their reputation as an animation powerhouse by seemingly releasing one hit after another almost on a yearly basis. While the studio's reputation hasn't wavered in the proceeding years, the notion that they're churning out one seminal classic after another has. Pixar has absolutely produced far more good than mediocre (I wouldn't say aside from the Cars sequels and their worst effort, The Good Dinosaur, that Pixar has ever made a product I'd label as bad), but there seems to be a bit of the dreaded assembly line connotation that's been applied to some of their films of late. The output has been a lot of ho-hum sequels to original works from their glory days mixed with original content that have already regressed into background of memorable Pixar moments. While the studio is still more than capable of exciting fans around the world, and last year's Oscar-winning Toy Story 4 shows they're far from having lost their signature touch, there does seem to be a suspicion of Pixar resting on their laurels and not breaking any new ground. A lot of this, in my opinion, is because they've been putting out two movies a year at times and the quality has suffered as a result. Well, 2020 is another year that they're following this approach, and the first of their entries for the year is Onward, a movie that has generated quite possibly the least amount of interest yet for Pixar despite being a decent entry. It's not a film that will shake the moniker that Pixar has lost a step, but it's also not going to send anyone into a panic that all is lost for the most successful animation studio either.

The concept of Onward is one that I'm sure tabletop game players and fantasy-genre aficionados alike have long pondered about where what if our modern world had its origins in something akin to Middle-Earth and we saw Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and a host of other creatures moving on the primitive notion of magic and assimilated to our culture of cars, cellphones, and even public education. That's what the world of Onward is based on, where the luster of magic and quest chasing has long evaporated and the various anthropomorphized fantasy creatures prefer the simple life of electric stoves and gas-powered automobiles. While this is certainly an interesting, albeit hardly groundbreaking, idea I don't feel like the film ever lives up to its lofty premise as well as it should. Surely there has to be some legion of traditionalists that practice magic and yearn for the lore of old? We certainly have people rushing off gleefully to Renaissance fairs and Civil War reenactments in our world, so I don't really buy it. With the endless possibilities at their disposal with a free-flowing concept like this, Pixar feels like it's playing matters quite safely with Onward and the plot as a result never moves past charming and efficient.

Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) is an Elf who's a bit of an outcast at school and doesn't brim with a lot of self-confidence. It's his sixteenth birthday, and we learn from his mother, Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), that his father died when he was very young. Ian's older brother, Barley (Chris Pratt), seems to be the only person in this world that's still interested in the days of old, spending his time roleplaying in a game similar to Dungeons & Dragons and attempting to preserve historic sites from modernization. He serves as our information guide throughout the film, which works surprisingly well as he sort of supplants the archetype old teacher for the zany older brother who's informed but not always composed. Laurel tells Ian and Barley that their late father left them a present only to be opened when Ian turns sixteen, which turns out to be a wizard staff (that looks like it may have been stolen from Gandalf directly) packaged with a spell that can bring their father back to life for twenty-four hours. The spell is a halfway success as only the bottom part of their father's body comes back, and with little time to lose the brothers race off to find another gem that will complete the spell before they run out of time. That's really all there is to the storyline, a sort of glorified fetch quest scenario, but director Dan Scanlon knows this and keeps things moving at an efficient clip. There's not nearly as many scenarios or environments or even peril as you'd hope for, though there is a fun sequence where they meet the legendary Manticore (Octavia Spencer), who far removed from her days as a ferocious warrior is now using her brand to operate a glorified Chuck E. Cheese. There are clever moments like this throughout the script, but again nothing overly memorable either. Pratt does a lot of the heavy lifting comedy-wise, and even the body humor of their dad's legs never reaches the heights of even a Weekend at Bernie's sort of sophomoric chuckling. 

And yet despite its many shortcomings, I never felt myself annoyed at Onward or overly dismayed as its lack of push. The film made me laugh on more than a few occasions, and despite being a fairly obvious proceeding of plot did surprise me with its climax. Pixar films may operate on a formula mostly, but they are still damn good at eliciting genuine emotion out of their storylines, oftentimes centering on the absence of a child-parent relationship that generally works very well. Onward carries this same sentimentality, but flips it just slightly in a manner that provides perhaps the one surprise the film has to offer. Hey, if you're gonna have one moment that's not by-the-numbers in a very by-the-numbers film, make it the climactic scene, and Onward does just that. Pixar hasn't capitalized on its fun concept as much as it should have, nor does this film reinvent the Pixar wheel in any fashion, but it's an enjoyable enough romp to merit a viewing as breezy escapism. Maybe we do tend to give Pixar movies more benefit of the doubt than other animation studios, but frankly even their mediocre outputs have a lot more life and authenticity than the cringe offerings of Blue Sky or Illumination, and, well, Pixar has earned it. Like most of its recent movies, Onward isn't going to be in the annals of Pixar greats, but it's good enough to be a service to the studio name, and sometimes that's just fine.

7/10