Onward

This latest Pixar movie manages to be a film that’ll make you examine your relationships, as well as mining solid fantasy and having the feel of an 80s caper film. It references High School comedies with the misfit character; it references those John Hughes type films with an absent father; it even references Indiana Jones. And it references a few more things…

The premise is that a kingdom has been devoid of magic for a long time, and so those magical creatures like Dragons, Centaurs and Unicorns are mere creatures. Within a troll family, Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) turns 16. He is the dorky kid at school, and his older brother Barley (Chris Pratt) is into a fantasy role-play board-game. Barley has vague memories of their father, who died when Ian was very young, and Ian clings on to a view of the man—and aspires to be what his father means to him. He makes a list in a notebook (using the retractable ballpoint pen with the multiple colours) and ticks them off or crosses them out.

Magic is all but gone and those who search for it are mocked as being ‘history buffs’ or otherwise rooted in the past. You could take this as an allegory for political change and decline in personal belief in any one thing at the expense of another… or you could take it as a family story and a quest movie. When Ian discovers that he has some magical power, and that there may be an opportunity to magic his father back to life for a day, he and his brother try it, and it’s the quest that brings the brothers together.

This is such a joyful film, and it’s visually incredibly lavish. As with all Pixar movies it’s the detail that adds to the fun—the idea that this magical world has been carefully designed and as much attention paid to the art as to the emotional beat of the story. A film that imagines a diverse cultural landscape and uses magic as an analogue for social and ethnic diversity borders on genius. And for the same film to reference Weekend At Bernie’s (a film that I only know through references!) is incredible.

Vocal performances are excellent. The two lead actors vanish into their characters, which are perfectly rendered to visually represent the school dork and the older brother with the obsessiveness and the clapped out van—which is itself a richly visualised prop. Octavia Spencer, who is cinematic Royalty, voices a manticore who becomes fronds with the kids’ mother Laurel (Julia Louise-Dreyfus). The centaur cop Colt Bronco (Mel Rodriguez) is comic relief, and the police chase is one of the most 80s things ever.

This is a delightful cinematic experience. And Disney owns Fox which means they own The Simpsons—so the pre-title short film is a Simpsons story, which sounds like it isn’t going to be fun but in fact it is. Onward isn’t perhaps as good as some of the very best of Pixar, and the story might not work for a lot of people because it is a fairly regular magical quest. However the breadth of the imagination involved in telling this story is the very definition of fabulous.