After a full 10 years of making unenthusiastic if financially-successful sequels, with the occasional break here and there in order to let Pete Docter do his thing, Pixar has finally resumed doing what they do best: Creating original and engaging high-concept animated cinema with mass appeal. To use an oft over-applied phrase by critics, their latest film, Chris Scanlan’s deeply personal and very entertaining Onward, is a return to form, and will hopefully prove to be a bellwether for their output in the coming decade. It’s full of imagination, something that their last few films have been bereft of, and its setting — a former world of wizards and magic turned mild by the advent of technological advance — is by far its biggest attraction.
We’re introduced Onward’s fantastical world through a montage, depicting the origins of its suburban fantasy world and the eroding of magic over the course of the decades, before we meet Ian (Tom Holland), a freshly 16-year-old elf who grew up without knowing his father, who passed away shortly before he was born from an unknown illness. However, he’s been lucky enough to have a loving mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and a goofy-but-charming neckbeardy older brother, Barley (Chris Pratt, doing his best Jack Black impression), to raise him in his absence. Still, he feels the hole in his heart where his father’s love should be, and as a result, he chalks up every one of his personal failings to the fact that he isn’t like his dad. As you might expect with these details, the film begins slowly, in that weird almost-maudlin way that some animated movies often do, when they strain for emotional import — this film means something, and you’ll probably cry, it seems to imply — but the details laid down in the first 20 or so minutes do serve a purpose.
Anyway, after a stressful day at high school, not helped by Barley’s nerdy antics in the parking lot outside of school, the family gets together to celebrate Ian’s birthday, and his mother remembers something important: Ian and Barley’s dad left a present for the two that they were only to open after they turned both had turned 16. The pair unwrap this mystery gift and discover that their father had spirited away an old wizard staff for the two, and, near the end of his life, written a spell to bring him back so that he could see his sons as adults, just for one day. Barley doesn’t have the magical gifts that his dad did, but Ian does, and the two do their best to complete the spell, but an accident occurs, and they’re only able to bring back his bottom half, and as a result, dear ol’ Dad is literally a pair of legs with a glowing bit right at the belt-line. So, the pair must go on a quest, just like in olden times, in order to get to spend some time with their father before the spell wears off the next day. Packing in Barley’s van, Guinevere, the brothers will have to track down The Manticore (a very funny Octavia Spencer), an ancient warrior who knows the secrets of the land that surrounds them, and dodge the cops (including their mother’s new boyfriend) in order to bring him back.
The world that Scanlan’s created is by far Onward’s biggest attraction and its mixture of high-fantasy and suburban mundanity is endlessly compelling, from the biggest set-piece (the Manticore’s formerly mysterious tavern being transformed into a family-dining establishment, complete with costumed characters) all the way down to the smallest throw-away gag (I remain stupidly amused by the presence of a soda called Mountain Doom in a few of the locales, a full week after having seen it). It’s by far the most interesting world that Pixar’s created in the past decade, and also the most original, as it didn’t have a competing vision beating it to theaters (Coco) and isn’t firmly rooted in reality or the historical past (Brave, Inside Out). And, unlike The Good Dinosaur, the concept is explored enough to make it engaging and has the same technological polish as that film while containing a compelling story. Even the tiniest visual detail, such as the cracks in the logo on Ian’s much-loved sweatshirt, feels astonishingly real, but it never feels out of place with the rest of the cartoony aesthetic, which is something that Good Dinosaur struggled with mightily.
Yet, the weird Randian ethos at the heart of a lot of Pixar work remains fully intact, even though Brad Bird had nothing to do with its creation. It becomes, at points, pretty distracting over the course of the film: at the start of the film, in a montage-prologue, we learn that people abandoned magic because they were lazy and because the technology was “easier.” That perspective is at odds with what the film later tells us, as only a certain number of the residents of this world can use magic at all, and, in the past, the rest of the non-magical peoples would simply have to hope that a kind-hearted wizard would walk by in order to light or heat their homes at night. So, what is essentially technological democratization of this type of power, formerly held in the hands of the very few, is presented to us as the talented, once again, being held back and limited by the self-serving and lazy masses. We’re one frivolous lawsuit away from having this be in a shared cinematic universe with The Incredibles, honestly.
But this is still Pixar, so the humor and the smart character development smooth over many of these rougher ideological edges. Onward’s slapstick chaos is often uproariously funny — you’d be surprised at how little it actually owes to Weekend at Bernie’s in practice – and is frequently coupled with the studio’s tendency to raise stakes so highly throughout these action scenes (often resulting an almost-unbearable amount of tension for younger viewers at the moment). This leads to some wonderfully thrilling and goofy sequences, like a highway chase between our lead trio and a group of angry Pixie bikers after an awkward encounter at a gas station, which grow to be so complicated and wacky that it feels like the studio has finally let go of their need to wring tears out of you at every fucking second after they’d been meme’d into doing so once Up hit theaters. And that makes it so that, when they want you to turn on the waterworks, Onward is much more effective at doing so than other recent works, owing to the personal nature of Scanlan’s story here. A well-timed and thematically-justified swerve also helps to achieve this, and it makes the film into something much more interesting and complicated than one might initially expect.
So, yeah, Onward is a step in the right direction for Pixar, especially after the decade they’ve had under the suffocating thumb of the Iger-Disney monolith. It’s amazing what this studio can do when their parent company stops seeing them as a cash-cow sequel factory, and it’s often frustrating to think about the decade’s worth of cinema we might have gotten had Circle 7 Animation remained active even after the Mouse’s purchase of Pixar. But, thankfully, at least the change finally came before Disney forced them to make another Cars, or, god forbid, a sequel to the already-perfect Ratatouille.