'Onward'

From a DNA perspective, Onward has all the proverbial genetic makeup we have come to associate with Pixar Studios. It is colorful and quirky - its visual richness built on the appeal of both Dungeons & Dragons and Muppets. It sprinkles comedy around a hard-driving adventure story. At the heart of its story is a deep pathos, one that hovers just below the surface until it wells up for the climax. Yes, parents, this is another Pixar film that might bring you to tears as fast as it can make you smile.

And yet, to paraphrase a work colleague of mine, this isn’t exactly a classic for a studio that has made so many of them over the last three decades. Sure, Onward has all the trappings of its fellow travelers. And, like pretty much every other film put out by the studio, it sure has its moments. But even with an ending that successfully pulls every one of the heartstrings, it lands decidedly in Pixar’s second tier.

You might pick up on the B-player status of Onward as the film begins and a narrator makes overt what typically goes unexplained in other Pixar films. We are entering a world where magic once reigned, but where technology has overtaken it. It is familiar to us - there are houses and cars and happy beings - and yet not our world exactly. The houses look like mushrooms from a Mario Brothers game, and the happy beings are bright purple and blue elves and pixies and manticores and so on. Making the world-building so explicit — so … spoken — is probably only necessary because the rest of the film is so herky-jerky.

Once you have the full context you meet Ian and Barley Lightfoot, a younger and older brother, voiced by mega-stars Tom Holland and Chris Pratt, respectively. They lost their dad to illness as youngsters, but have been doted upon by their mother Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and now, as young adults, seem to enjoy the kind of love-hate-roll-your-eyes sibling relationship a lot of people will recognize. They are yin and yang.

Barley is bombastic and blustery — seemingly unfazed by what anyone thinks of him as he engages in magic-inspired games and drives sloppily around town in a rickety, unicorn-emblazoned van he has named Guenivere. Pratt does a reasonably charming job here, but I spent most of the film wondering if Jack Black was unavailable.

Holland’s Ian, meanwhile, is much more with type for the actor. He’s skinny, shy, and always second-guessing himself. He seems to wear the loss of a father he never knew on his sleeve, every single day.

So it’s exciting when the magic we are told is very much real is used to conjure his father back from the dead — well, at least his lower half before the magic sputters out. With Ian’s dream to meet his father only half-fulfilled and only 24 hours before it wears off altogether, off he and Barley go on a capital-q quest to bring the rest of their dad back.

There’s a ton of charm in the story, but because the world and the story itself leans so heavily on the nerdy subculture best defined by the likes of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, I am afraid much of that charm will be totally inaccessible to some, especially younger viewers who typically are a big part of Pixar’s audience.

Even so, there’s more than enough here to make this an enjoyable watch for all — from the centaur-related sight gags to the syrupy-sweeet, sibling love-in at its core.

I’ll forever associate Onward with the start of a world-changing pandemic - with its aborted run at the theaters and its delivery to the homebound masses on a streaming platform months early. I am happy to have it, pandemic or no, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of Toy Story or Finding Nemo.