THIS ‘FROZEN FOR BOYS’ WILL MELT YOUR HEART
Fresh off Pixar’s conveyor belt, a magical tale of elf brothers and their lost father
Worryingly for those of us who remember it like it was yesterday, or at any rate the day before yesterday, this year marks a quarter of a century since Pixar burst into cinemagoers’ consciousness with the sublime Toy Story.
Since 1995, those supremely gifted animators, writers and directors have churned out featurelength animations at the rate of almost one a year, making their latest, onward, number 22. it ranks pretty high, too, certainly nudging Pixar’s top ten.
A few, such as three or maybe all four of the Toy Story films, The incredibles, inside out and Finding nemo, are surely unassailable at the top of that illustrious list.
But onward contains plenty of what makes the Pixar factory such a prized asset of the allconquering Disney empire, which acquired it for just the $7.4 billion (£5.7 billion) in 2006.
The film, directed and co-written by Dan Scanlon, is beautifully crafted and huge fun, with a few moments of poignancy that will pierce all but the stoniest hearts, as a pair of teenage elf brothers try to magic their dead father back to life.
Scanlon was moved by the death of his own father to make this film. He was the younger of two brothers, whose dad passed away when they were children.
if you’ll indulge some personal musings for a moment, i suffered a similar loss. i was 14 when my father died suddenly, and find that i think of him more and more as i creep closer to the age when he made his abrupt exit. i never knew him on adult terms, so if he came back for a day, what would we say to each other? i often wonder.
That is the exact premise of onward, but cocooned by Pixar’s usual wit and visual invention from any charges of over-sentimentality. ian lightfoot (voiced by Tom Holland) is our hero, a 16-year-old elf growing up in the town of new Mushroomton. He has no memories of his dad, Wilden ( Kyle Bornheimer), and must absorb them second-hand from his older brother, Barley (Chris Pratt).
Unhelpfully, Barley is as wildly exuberant as ian is gently introspective — fanatical about the mystical heritage of elves, even though they now live in a world that is less Middle-earth, more Middle America. This yields lots of great sight gags, including unicorns rooting around in dustbins like urban foxes.
Meanwhile, the brothers’ mother, laurel (Julia louis-Dreyfus), has a traffic cop boyfriend (Mel rodriguez) who also happens to be a centaur.
And an ancient, fire-breathing dragon-like creature called the Manticore (octavia Spencer) has stopped incinerating her enemies in favour of running a Dark Ages theme restaurant.
As for the quest to bring Wilden
back from the dead, that takes shape when Laurel gives her sons a magic staff that he bequeathed them.
Ironically, it turns out to be Ian, not Barley, who has the powers of wizardry, although when he invokes a spell to re- animate Wilden for 24 hours, it only half works.
Their father duly materialises only from the waist down. To bring back the rest of him they must find an enchanted gemstone, propelling them on a crazy adventure against the clock which, very movingly, cements their fraternal bond.
Onward has been described simplistically as ‘ Frozen for boys’, although, as succinct summaries go, that’s not a bad one. There are worse things for an animated film to be.
Yes, if the charge of sentimentality doesn’t stick, a charge of unoriginality might. While Ian Lightfoot isn’t quite a pointy- eared Harry Potter, at times there’s a bit of a derivative boy-wizard shimmer around him.
But never mind that. Onward is still magical.
SO, In an altogether different way, is Military Wives. It is inspired by the story of the first of those military wives’ choirs, which began before choirmaster Gareth Malone and the BBC turned them into a cultural phenomenon.
Peter Cattaneo’s film hits all the right notes, with Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan perfectly cast as two Army wives who lead a motley group of women all the way to the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall.
Cattaneo also made the 1997 smash hit The Full Monty, and this film has much of the same charm. Indeed, it follows a remarkably similar formula: an uplifting triumph, against the odds, of a seemingly illmatched collective, several of whom are also mired in personal turmoil.
It’s even set in Yorkshire, like The Full Monty.
Yet what makes this picture such a delight is not only what it is, but also what it isn’t. It could have been irredeemably corny, cheesily sentimental.
It could also have failed to overcome one obvious problem: The poundingly emotional real-life stories of these choirs have already been compellingly documented on television; a lightly fictionalised version might have felt superfluous.
Instead, it feels rousingly relevant, for which due credit belongs to screenwriters Rosanne Flynn and Rachel Tunnard, as well as Cattaneo and a tip-top cast.
Scott Thomas is especially wonderful. She plays Kate, whose husband, Richard (Greg
Wise, also just right), is the colonel at a Yorkshire garrison. The couple are suffering a terrible bereavement, but are dealing with it in the stiffupper-lipped way of both the Army and their class.
Military Wives is full of social nuances, as Kate locks horns with Lisa (Horgan), who is married to the regimental sergeant-major.
The pair try to get a choir going while their menfolk are serving in Afghanistan, but brisk, decent, well-intentioned Kate is too bossy and buttoned-up to make much of a connection with the other women. And Lisa, though far more clubbable, has her own problems, largely in the form of her rebellious daughter (India Ria Amarteifio).
Will they end up bonding? Will the choir deal with news of a distant fatality, which makes it feel suddenly trivial, not to mention the lesser problem of a tone- deaf member in its ranks?
If you’ve seen just about any British feel-good film of the last 25 years, from The Full Monty and Brassed Off (1996) to Pride (2014) and Fisherman’s Friends (2019), you’ll already know the answer.
But it’s still immensely uplifting watching it happen.