All trousers and no talk as Pixar tackles grief
Dir Dan Scanlon Starring (voices) Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Ali Wong, Lena Waithe, Mel Rodriguez
This year will mark the 25th anniversary of Pixar’s Toy Story, which changed animation as we knew it in 1995. One day the company may bowl us over with a slam-dunk masterwork that’s equally fresh and inspired. But it’s hard. They’ve made entire films – Ratatouille, with its culinary perfectionism – about just that: the problem of setting yourself a benchmark that’s virtually unrepeatable by mortal standards.
Onward may be middle-of-the-pack
Pixar but it’s still a real pleasure – a self-aware fantasy quest story, set in a magic kingdom where the magic has died. If you imagine Dungeons & Dragons trapped in contemporary suburbia – where tabletop role-playing has always found its natural habitat – you’ve got the idea.
Orcs, sprites and ogres live in this commuter-sprawl metropolis, along with unicorns, robbed of their enchantment, which rummage ferally in bins. The main characters, well-off and living humdrum lives, are elvish brothers: two blue-skinned teenagers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), brought up by a widowed, peacekeeping mum (Julia Louisdreyfus), the relationship between her boys being squarely combative.
Ian, awkward and shy, is about to turn 16, while his older brother is a classic misfit nerd, bulging out of his denim, with heavy-metal tastes and an obsession with dice-rolling fantasy lore. Barley’s as much a history nut as a swords-and-sorcery fanboy, since the games he coordinates as dungeon master represent the last remnants of civilisation as it was once lived.
An eruption of the old magic changes everything for a single day, when a staff, a gem and a scroll their dad wrote gives them the power to summon him back. Except it doesn’t quite work. The spell aborts halfway, meaning he only materialises up to the waist. And while half a dad, for 24 hours, is better than no dad at all, it’s not the most useful portion: unable to see, speak or do much at all, this spectral pair of trousers can only teeter about haphazardly and do the odd bit of communication by tap-dancing in his brogues.
There are zany sight gags galore, especially when Ian fashions a top half out of some useless old clothes, sticks on a pair of shades, and this sockpuppet patriarch flops around like the dead body from Weekend at Bernie’s. Hope is alive to get the rest of him up and running – it just means a race to find another gem. Barley’s all over this, overjoyed at having an honest-togoodness real-world quest to complete.
For Ian, who never knew his dad in the first place, it’s an altogether more sober business. He’s such a Tom Holland type, and Barley such a Pratt, that I scribbled their names down virtually on sight: it’s the kind of voice work that slots into a completely organic groove, and helps this relationship build layers while all sorts of other antics keep us entertained.
Pixar always manages to pull this off. The film’s arc is hidden in plain sight – the treatment of grief, in fact, is like a cover story for a smuggled assortment of other learnings. It might not be for everyone, this particular jaunt, and non-siblings (I’m just guessing) could find themselves shallowly amused. Perhaps you need to be a brother, and have one? Or at least one out of those?
As one of three boys, it got me. But however well-earned the payoff, the film, with its scary bottomless pits, its angry sprites in biker gear, and Octavia Spencer’s turn as a tamed manticore, is undeniably and friskily engaging right the way through – more so by a good notch than Monsters University, Dan Scanlon’s previous directing credit.
Enjoyment at every step is its whole point – even its theme. Ian, stressed and forlorn, has his eyes so fixed on an ultimate prize that’s not for keeps, he doesn’t grasp that the quest itself – the latest entry in a long line of Pixarian life metaphors – is the thing to slow down and savour. “Onward” is the nickname for the one gear in Barley’s battered old van that works. It’s the only one they need.
It’s set in a magic kingdom where the magic has died, a suburban sprawl in which unicorns rummage in bins