Review of Onward (2020) by Hnestlyonthesly — 08 Mar 2020

“Onward was sad all the way through. At no point does it cease being sad. At points, it’s funny, but never happy. They are constantly losing things as try to temporarily regain a thing they’ve already lost permanently,” was Wife’s assessment after leaving the theater. She was attracted to this movie for two reasons: she nurses a soft spot for absurdist humor and resurrecting your dead dad but just pants checked that box, but also the premise of what if magic but now? Onward, despite being the first original Pixar movie since that complete knock off of The Book of Life, Coco, has been getting some criticism for feeling formulaic.

And to be sure there are elements of the Hero’s Journey throughout, but I agree with Wife when she says, the movie does a good job of being self-referential in terms of its borrowing from other stories. It’s not just a fantasy movie. Its characters are learning things from a D&D guide. Their mission-giving Barkeep doesn’t play her role straight, she’s evolved past those genre tropes and then come back around on the next pendulum swing. Sure, there’s pixies and elves and a dragon or two, but they are less central to the storytelling than might first appear. The individual scenes rely more on a funny premise about the magical modern world (by the way, one of the coolest books that doubles down on this premise is The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams, which was written before and after 9/11), like what if pixies but a gang, or what if tavern but for kids, what if boat but Cheeto, etc.

Some of the most poignant moments aren’t magically or familially premised at all, really. My favorite moment is admittedly a Bing-Bong-esque (from Inside Out) final scene when Barley sacrifices his beloved van, the one thing he wants to be able to show his father, in order to continue on the quest. This is the sort of thing Wife means when she says that the boys are constantly losing things in order to temporarily regain something permanently lost. They shed their most prized possessions and desires in order to be able to discover, like Dorothy (in more ways than one, Wife compares this movie to that), they never really lost anything in the first place.

I went in prepared for this to be a tearjerker of a dad-son movie, but, honestly, it’s more of a pro-sibling and pro-car movie than anything else. For anyone who doesn’t have a brother or sister and anyone who’s never tried to learn how to drive a car, this movie will be deeply, deeply alienating, which I think makes it fun. Friend says he could imagine a situation in which there had been multiple scripts for how long Ian and Barley would spend with their dad, and the idea that they went with, “none” or “close to none” was a strong choice.

If I were going to pick apart one nefarious little detail in this movie, I’d say one of the most troubling aspects of this movie that goes unaddressed is the fact that magic seems to exhibit features of selective inheritance. Barley is completely unable to cast spells, despite his self-confidence and his “heartsfire,” despite his own magical father’s genes, and his father’s wish that they will have “a little magic” in them too. If the wishes of a dying wizard parent cannot inject a little extra magic in you, what will? The learning of even high level magic spells isn’t actually that difficult–Ian’s able to Mary-Jane his way into a top level sorcerer in about a day’s time–but something arbitrary and deeply unfair prevents Barley from being able to cast magic, despite the fact that Manticores and pixies can fly, centaurs can run fast, and basically every other magical creature can magic stuff. Barley doesn’t feel jealous about this (yet), but it does sort of subjugate him to the dewy-eyed, cheerleading best friend role in a way that doesn’t quite feel resolved.

I didn’t find Onward to be boring, not nearly as terrible as The Good Dinosaur, and I prefer it immensely to sequel three of Toy Story or even two of Frozen.