LITTLE KIDS, BIG QUESTIONS
Studio explores death and afterlife again in Onward
Pixar Studios has never shied away from death, with the Ellie’s Theme scene from Up standing as perhaps animation’s greatest montage ever on mortality. Yet after a quarter-century of feature films, the studio is increasingly peeling back the curtain on what might lie beyond.
The Oscar-winning Coco was a first foray in 2017, as a boy guitarist crossed a marigold bridge to the afterlife. Now, Pixar is delivering two movies in the coming months — Onward (in theatres now) and Soul (June 19) — that look toward the eternal and ethereal.
So just what is moving the studio’s animators to let their imaginations roam beyond the finite now?
“The films have matured because the people who made them are maturing, too,” says Kelsey Mann, head of story on Onward.
“You could look at Pete
Docter’s work and how he’s grown in what he deals with as he moves from next film to next film,” adds Mann, who previously worked with Onward director Dan Scanlon on Monsters University. “And Dan’s the same way.”
Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, joined the company right out of California Institute of the Arts three decades ago, immediately contributing to the studio’s breakthrough first feature film, Toy Story — a franchise that has poignantly dealt with loss and the passage of time. Docter has asked ever bigger questions as he has directed Up, Inside Out and now Soul, in which a musician who has lost his passion for music ends up in another realm, trying to reconnect with his own spirit.
“The subject definitely gives us a lot of intriguing, meaty themes to explore,” Docter says. “The challenge, of course, is that no one knows without a doubt what all that entails — and some people have definite beliefs which we don’t want to accost, never mind the design challenge!”
For Scanlon, Onward began as a deeply personal movie.
In a world inspired by fantasy role-playing, teenage elf brothers try to meet the deceased father they never got to know, embarking on a hero’s quest in a campaign full of enchanted challenges and supernatural mysteries. Scanlon lost his own father when he was a year old and his brother, Bill, was three.
“Much like the characters in the movie, we have no memories of him,” Scanlon says.
In Onward, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland), upon his 16th birthday, has a chance to be with his father for one day, but when the gem-powered spell goes awry, Ian and elder brother Barley (Chris Pratt) spend hours with only half their physical dad, who is represented as a light-emitting pair of khaki pants and leather shoes.
To assemble a sense of his own father, Scanlon has clung to whatever others can share, including an audio tape — found when he was a teenager — on which his dad says only two cherished words: “Hello.” And “goodbye.” Growing up, “Every piece of him was special,” Scanlon says. “We just made that metaphor literally a piece of him” in the film.
The search for answers about the afterlife is also a quest for meaning, says Scanlon: “Part of the reason we as people look toward the end is to look toward the point — to look at why we lived.”
So a film like Onward, Scanlon says, becomes “a celebration of life more than anything — a reminder of why to live and asking what do you want to put out there” while on Earth.
While wrestling with the great beyond, though, Pixar is still very much in the business of entertaining children.
“Sometimes we worry about the concepts being too much for kids to grasp,” Mann says. Yet, “More often than not, every time we do a kids’ screening, it always comes back: ‘Yeah, they got it.’”
The approach of Onward to dealing with larger themes does have its critics. The AV Club writes of Onward: “Even Pixar, Disney’s hipper cousin, can’t resist the instant pathos of a croaked parent.”
Yet Mann says that animation, like puppetry, provides an extra wrinkle when dramatizing the spark of what it means to be alive and searching — a tale spun through the illusion of a virtual life.
“I am such a fan of the Muppets, and I feel like they did the same thing: It’s just a piece of film, but they feel like they really have like a soul,” he says. “That’s what we get to do every day at work: We get to give life to something that’s not human.”