ANI-MOVIES, *Onward

Disney's first Pixar release of 2020 came out just at the dawn of the coronavirus, so Onward already had an uphill battle trying to get anyone to dare coming out to the theaters. Monsters University director Dan Scalon headed this project that was an original story he had written with Keith Bunin and Jason Headley which took about three years to complete. The movie unfortunately didn't make any of its money back at first because of the pandemic although it has gone on to gain some accolades after it went to streaming. Onward is a low fantasy tale that mixes family values with a road trip comedy, but with eldritch beings instead of humans into a genre usually referred to as elfpunk.

In a version of our world entirely populated by enchanted creatures, magic was commonplace along with your standard dungeon quests with magic users. Somewhere along the line, this society gave up using sorcery with the rise of technology, so they replaced their magic wands for automatic garage doors. Set in modern day, young Ian Lightfoot is an elf turning sixteen even though he never knew his father who died before he was born. Ian's mother Laurel is currently dating a centaur police officer that is always on the case of his older brother Barley for being a slacker who is more interested in preserving the abandoned ways of magic and is ravenously into RPGs. It turns out Ian's father left a wizard's staff behind for them to bring him back to life for a single day. The staff is powered by a rare gem which is entirely spent conjuring up only their father from the waist on down, so Ian and Barley take a tip from a gaming manual to find a manticore who it claims to have another gem. Turns out the manticore now runs a family restaurant, but the brothers use a map meant for kids to locate the gem. Laurel gets wind of this and sets out to make sure her boys don't use the gem as it might unleash a curse. Along the way, Ian learns he can use magic with the staff which helps when he and Barley come across pixie bikers and other obstacles, only to find that their quest leads right back to the local high school. Barley finds the gem followed by the curse which takes the form of a dragon made of parts of the school building, but Laural manages to help stop it with the manticore's old sword. Unfortunately, the remainder of their father's time is about spent, and Ian is stuck under some debris making Barley the only one who gets to say goodbye to their fully corporeal father before he disappears. Barley relays his father's love to Ian and they help people get interested in magic again.

Onward is up to scratch as far as Pixar movies go, at least that far as not being one of their gratuitous sequels. There doesn't seem to be as much love for this film that most generic Disney fanatics have so for some of their other releases, but having it come out just at the start of pandemic lockdown really put people in a bad mood which affected the movie's overall outcome. The animation and lush backdrops are picturesque, although Pixar didn't appear to put as much effort into this like some of the other visual masterpieces like Up or The Incredibles. The premise for this might have made for a reasonable series on streaming because the standard feature length doesn't do this urban fantasy world enough justice.