Yearning dad
Director’s childhood memory became Disney-Pixar’s ‘Onward’
BERLIN — There’s a childhood memory that helps explain how “Outward” came to be the latest animated fantasy from Disney-Pixar. Director Dan Scanlon, sitting next to his producer Kori Rae in Berlin where “Onward” had its world premiere, said, “Kori and I did ‘Monsters University’ together in 2013. “After, we wanted to make something more personal, something that came from an honest place. “I told Kori about losing my father when I was a year old and my brother was 3. We had questions, not knowing my father at all and wondered how were we like him. “In doing research for this,” Scanlon, 43, said, “my story came up. When I was a kid, I didn’t remember my dad. We had photos and home movies but when I was a kid (there) were movies but no sound. We never heard his voice and thought we never would.”
Then, when he was a teenager, Scanlon received a cassette from his aunt with a note, “We think your father is on this.”
He listened and heard his aunt say of his dad, “Bill is out of the room. Where is he?”
“And my aunt stopped him and said, ‘Bill, say something into the machine.’ And he said, ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ — and that was all we got.”
“Onward” is about two elves, brothers, whose father has also been long gone. Barley Lightfoot (voiced by Chris Pratt), the elder, is a husky kid obsessed with magic, spells and wizards and determined to go on a glorious quest.
The Lightfoots live in a world where all sorts of fantasy creatures — unicorns, cyclops, a manticore — are part of daily life, only the magic has disappeared.
Barley’s younger high school-aged brother, Ian (Tom “Spider-Man” Holland), is sensitive, a nerd.
In ways that seem perfectly natural in the “Onward” landscape, the brothers attempt to magically resurrect their long dead dad when they find the wizard’s staff he left for them, which they can use to have dad back for 24 hours.
“If you want your father coming back for a day, what better way than magic?” Scanlon figured. “Magic is romantic.”
“From there,” added Rae, “we constructed a fantasy world and decided not to tell a period piece, because it’s a modern story and that’s where the modern fantasy world is to take place and the brothers can use that magic.”
And that explains why the original title of “Onward” was “Suburban World of Fantasy.”