Review: Onward (2020)

Onward (2020)

Rated PG for action/peril and some mild thematic elements

Score: 4 out of 5

A perfect example of mid-tier Pixar doing what it does best, Onward is a film that starts out with a creative hook reminiscent of a family-friendly version of Bright and then uses it as the base for a conventional, but well-told, mashup of epic fantasy and a teen coming-of-age story. If you know what Pixar likes to do, there's not a whole lot here that's gonna surprise you, but what matters is that they do it to their high standard of quality, making a film that feels as weighty and substantial as you'd expect from them without losing their lighthearted sense of humor. It's the kind of movie where you know exactly what you're gonna get if your watch the trailer, and the filmmakers aren't exactly keen to challenge that expectation, delivering a great cast of fun and creative characters and amusing twists on stock fantasy tropes. It's probably not gonna be spoken of as one of Pixar's all-time classics, but it's films like this that always make me excited whenever they're doing something that isn't a Cars sequel.

This film takes place in your stereotypical, medieval-European-inspired fantasy world... many, many years later, after it's developed modern technology and industry that turns out to be a lot easier to use than magic. The fantasy creatures now live in the suburbs, where the old village tavern is now a kitschy kids' restaurant, centaurs work as police officers, little dragons are kept as pets, the great quests of fantasy stories past are regarded as history, and magic is largely obsolete. Our protagonists are the brothers Ian and Barley Lightfoot, a pair of young elves who both feel like they're going nowhere in their lives. Ian is a dweeb in high school, while his "cool" older brother Barley is a guy who feels like he was born in the wrong century, one whose obsession with the magic and glory of the past manifests in the form of somebody who wears denim jackets, loves classic rock and metal, drives a van with a sweet paint job that he calls Guinevere, and obsesses over a Dungeons & Dragons-like game for its "historical accuracy". On Ian's sixteenth birthday, his mother gifts him a relic of the "old world", a magic staff that his father, who passed away long ago, left him. As it turns out, Dad was into magic, and wrote a spell before he died that would allow Ian to revive him for only twenty-four hours. Ian and Barley, interested in meeting their father again, try out the spell, only for it to go awry and leave them with only the bottom half of their father. Desperate to complete the spell, Ian and Barley set out in Guinevere with their father's disembodied legs to find a rare gemstone before sunset tomorrow that would allow them to bring Dad's top half into the world as well, all while their mother Laurel, realizing what a dangerous situation they've gotten themselves into, pursues close behind.

The big reason this movie worked for me is because, right away, I bought Ian and Barley as brothers, in no small part because it reminded me a bit of the relationship I've always had with my own brother, albeit with the age dynamic flipped. Ian felt like the kind of character who the teenage version of myself would've adored, and even now, he reminds me a lot of myself. Barley, meanwhile, is the guy who you know is gonna grow up to become a mechanic chiefly because it's what he loves to do, and before then, he's gonna introduce you to all the cool bands he loves that you're probably too young to listen to. Together, Ian and Barley are two guys who do not see eye-to-eye on everything, and frequently feud over the course of the story as their "quest" goes awry in all manner of ways, but the meat of the film fundamentally revolves around them learning to see and understand each other's perspectives. It helped that both Tom Holland and Chris Pratt brought their respective energy as Spider-Man and Star-Lord to Ian and Barley, with Pratt in particular stealing the show by adding a very boisterous, medieval-esque twist to his gung-ho snarker routine.

The supporting cast were also standouts, most notably Octavia Spencer as Corey, a manticore who, upon realizing that she and her tavern have gone soft over the years, joins Laurel on her own quest to once more become the fearsome beast she once was. She utterly dominates all of the many scenes she shares with Laurel, to the point that you can't help but feel bad for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose otherwise good performance winds up completely overshadowed by her partner for most of the movie. Most of the more minor characters are defined more by their appearance than anything, but here too, there was lots of fun to be had, from the pixies who have become outlaw bikers to a centaur (and Ian and Barley's soon-to-be stepdad) whose physiology requires him to drive an extra-large police SUV but could probably catch criminals on foot just fine given that he's as fast as a horse (as he eventually realizes).

There aren't many big twists here concerning magic, or Ian and Barley's "true" lineage, or what their father was really up to. It's a simple coming-of-age story about two guys going on a journey and learning about each other and themselves, with a whole heap of fantasy trappings thrown on, and it doesn't endeavor to be anything other than that. I think that there were parts where it honestly could've done a lot more with the "fantasy world in the modern day" premise beyond just using it for jokes, especially in comparing the world the characters inhabit with the myths and legends of the past; while there were a few moments when it tilted in this direction, especially with its jokes about modern technology making the characters lazy, it's not really a major theme of the story. A side effect of this is that, despite all its allusions to epic fantasy, the plot ultimately doesn't really feel all that epic, not even when the protagonists are fighting monsters. The smaller stakes worked for the story it was telling and the themes of family that it was exploring, but I still think that there was a missed opportunity here to go grander with the film's ambitions without leaving those themes behind.

The Bottom Line

A relatively small-scale but well-told Pixar effort that was unfairly sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic kicking off just two weeks after it came out, Onward is one I highly recommend if you're a fan of fantasy or if you have kids.