Onward (2020)

Generally speaking, I think Pixar does good work. True, I haven’t seen all of their movies, but with the exception of Cars, I think even the studio’s lesser entries are at least entertaining. As such, while the new movie Onward was probably not going to rise to the level of, say, Inside Out, Up, or 75% of the Toy Story movies, it should at least be a good time at the multiplex.

And since this was looking to be a busy weekend at the movies, I went to check it out opening night.

Timid high schooler Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) never met his father, who died of an unstated disease before Ian was born. His boisterous, magic-loving older brother Barley (Chris Pratt) is something of a screw-up who can’t stop talking about magic, quests, and the history of their fantasy world where, because technology and science are easier than magic, no one does those sorts of things anymore. On Ian’s 16th birthday, the boy’s mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) gives them both a final gift from their late dad: a wizard’s staff with instructions to cast a spell in order to resurrect their dad for exactly 24 hours.

And while Barley, thanks to his love of history/roleplaying games, knows a lot about magic, he doesn’t have a talent for it. Ian does, it turns out, but something goes wrong and he only manages to resurrect his father’s lower half. Now the brothers will need to go on a quest to finish the spell so they can have a day with the father Ian never knew and Barely doesn’t much remember. Can one brother who is afraid of nothing and the other who isn’t afraid of anything finish a spell?

So, the movie seems, for the first act, more sentimental than funny. It’s Pixar, so they at least have cutting edge animation that pushes the limit here and there. The plot, on the other hand, is a bit more generic. The voice cast creates some likable characters, but the story beats are very familiar to anyone familiar with Pixar. To the movie’s credit, it never portrays Barley as being the slightest bit jealous of his brother being the one with a gift for magic. He’s encouraging and enthusiastic, sometimes to their detriment.

Additionally, factor in Octavia Spenser as the one time great adventurer the Manticore and some nice visual gags referencing a lot of typical fantasy tropes and Louis-Dreyfus as a suburban mom going adventuring to save her boys, and you end up with a nice movie that may not be among Pixar’s all-time greats, but it’s still an original story from them, has some good animation, and uses the usual character-based decisions that are supposed to touch the audience’s collective heart. Did this one touch my heart? Probably not as much as the makers thought it would. By this point, many of Pixar’s emotive tricks are a bit more familiar. They don’t play as insincere the way they probably would in a Minions movie, but the ones in Onward, Finding Dory, or Monsters University don’t hit the way they do in the studio’s better features like the aforementioned Inside Out or Up.

That said, this movie is still a bit of light fun. Pratt may be the most perfectly cast actor in the cast as the really enthusiastic Barley, a young man who doesn’t really know when to quit for either good or ill, but then again, Barley does seem to share quite a bit with one of Pratt’s best known characters.

Grade: B-