Movie Review: "Onward" Sees the Alchemists at Pixar Fuse Magic With Metal

And yes, it will make you cry.

Pixar, not content with simply making kids (and adults already on the edge of mortality crises) confront regular ol’ death in their movies, have pioneered plenty of new methods to make us mourn.

There was Coco, in which we learnt there was an afterlife (yay!) but if you were forgotten by the living, your ghost could die a "final death" (boo!). Then there was Toy Story 4, where we saw that our heroes had survived their near-incineration in TS3 (YAY!) only to discover that their relationships had plateaued and they needed to separate if they are to ever know true happiness (BOO!).

And now here comes Onward, in which two brothers get a final chance to spend one more day with their dead dad (yay?) but mess up the magical spell and only bring back his bottom half (oh c’mon).

I say all this with love, and you will not be surprised to learn that the actual magic makers at Pixar have found another way to suck tears from your eye sockets with great velocity, and they don’t even need a whole animated body to do it; a couple of sad legs tapping their feet is sob-worthy enough.

The film is written and directed by Monsters University’s Dan Scanlon, and reportedly based on how he and his own brother coped with the death of their father (he shares a screenwriting credit with Jason Headley and Keith Bunin). Of course, to keep this from being too emotionally gruelling, he sets the story in an alternate fantasy universe, where elves and fauns and centaurs roam, and magic is real. The thing is, the invention of technology in this world rendered magic useless, so now all these fantastic beasts live like modern-day humans, fixated on their phones and not so magical anymore.

So, it’s a surprise when nervy teen elf Ian (nervy almost-elf Tom Holland) receives a long-hidden gift from his late dad: a sorcerer’s staff. It comes with instructions on how to bring dad back for 24 hours, however, an interruption by Ian’s magic-loving older bro Barley (Chris Pratt in Andy Dwyer mode) bungles the spell, reviving only his legs. Thus the estranged siblings—and their half-dad—must embark on an epic trip in Barley’s rickety, psychedelic van Guinevere, seeking a special stone that will let them summon the rest of their father, allowing them to finally play catch, have a heart to heart, and make the audience sob into their popcorn as they confront their own impermanence.

Holland and Pratt, two soldiers in the Marvel army, make for a decent double act, even if neither is doing anything particularly different than what comes naturally (not a complaint). Julia Louis-Dreyfus rounds out the main voice cast as their mother Laurel, though the film mercifully spares us the agony of having mum scream-cry over the potential undoing of her husband’s untimely death… and puts her on a goofy side quest with Octavia Spencer’s manticore Corey to get the boys a sword they’ll need for the end of their journey. Strikingly vibrant, Zeppelin-inspired animation aside, you won’t believe how grateful you are that this tale takes one step out of the reality of grief and into pure fantasy. We’d be weeping constantly if Onward didn’t occasionally give us a gang of biker pixies or gelatinous green blobs to cause our protagonists some distractingly silly trouble.

When it matters most, however, at the inevitable climax, Scanlon sticks the landing, giving us a gentle and moving finale that doesn’t overplay its hand. It’s for the best. When it comes to leaving you a quivering wreck, Onward goes just far enough, and never further.

4/5

Onward will be available to buy digitally in Australian and New Zealand from 3 April 2020. It arrives on Disney+ from 24 April. Rated PG for mild themes, animated violence, sense of peril.