Much of the charm of Pixar's animated movies comes from the fact that the finished product often sounds like a rejected idea from a pitch meeting. The imagination and wit involved with a lot of their movies can't be contained in 25 words or less. The ideas covered in Inside Out, a movie that takes place in the brain of a teenage girl, take almost as much time to explain as it takes to watch the movie.
When I described the storyline of Onward to my Mom, the warm, thoughtful film on the screen sounded like a terrifying macabre fantasy.
In some ways, it is.
While the movie features elves, centaurs, fauns, and even dragons, the world depicted in Onward looks more suburban than mythical. Thanks to the internal combustion engine and the electric light bulb, magic seems like either an antiquated burden or a faint memory.
Barley Lightfoot (voiced by Chris Pratt) is an elf who can only experience spells and supernatural feats when he picks up role-playing game (RPG) cards. His younger brother Ian (Tom Holland), is even less adventurous.
Ian's about to turn 16, but he's too shy to even invite classmates to his birthday party. Seeing the introverted lad in a funk, his mother, Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), reveals that her long-dead husband left the boys a magic staff and a rare phoenix stone that will enable them to hang out with him for a single day. For Ian, the opportunity is poignant but scary because his father died shortly before he was born.
Barley tries to summon otherworldly forces but has no powers beyond his memory of the RPG cards. The reluctant Ian, however, has the makings of a potential wizard. Unfortunately, the spell short circuits as Ian gets used to the wizard staff.
As a result, only Dad's legs come back to life. They are conscious, but they can't see or communicate and wander into danger without knowing it. Barley and Ian scramble across their community in a rickety van trying to find the rock they need to resurrect the rest of their father.
If getting across town in Barley's van, called Guinevere, weren't challenging enough, the spell has a 24-hour time limit before Dad returns to oblivion.
Director Dan Scanlon and team of co-writers come up with a cornucopia of bizarre perils and equally imaginative countermeasures. If Onward's pleas for a return to magic seem simplistic, the ways that Ian and Barley use it to get into and out of trouble are strikingly clever.
The wizard's staff can perfectly disguise the boys as another being, but the ruse disintegrates the moment either lies.
Onward
86 Cast: With voices of Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Mel Rodriguez, Tracey Ullman, Lena Waithe, Ali Wong, Grey Griffin
Director: Dan Scanlon
Rating: PG, for action/peril and some mild thematic elements
Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Pinocchio had it easy with that telltale nose.
While there are some formidable talents providing voices in Onward (Octavia Spencer has a ball as a mythical creature who has given up flight to run a medieval version of Chuck E. Cheese), the most vivid character is the partially restored father. Scanlon and his crew have clearly spent a lot of time thinking how a being that operates solely from the waist down might behave. The sentient slacks convey a lot of heart and soul despite having no face or voice. They are as brash as Ian is shy.
The film packs an emotional wallop as the quest reaches its climax, but at times it is easier to admire Onward than it is to leap into Guinevere and go along for the ride. Scanlon may be playing with mythical spells, but he studiously follows dramatic rules like Chekhov's Gun. No development is introduced arbitrarily, and key objects and characters resurface logically without becoming predictable.
Because Onward is so carefully assembled, you can occasionally make out the welds in the construction. In the end, Scanlon's devotion to the rules of drama and magic wins out. Stan Lee was correct when he warned us "With great power comes great responsibility."
MovieStyle on 03/06/2020