Movie Breakdown: Onward (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
Where Pixar movies once stood as tentpoles to my film watching anticipation, after a few lackluster releases, the luster has dimmed. Onward ticks a lot of boxes – fantastical animated movies, centaurs, etc. – but I just don’t feel particularly invested in it in any way.
Post-Screening Ramble:
It may have taken awhile for the taint of Disney’s saccharine emotional touch to infiltrate the films of Pixar, but I do believe that Onward is both a symbol of the increasing presence of the mouse-eared behemoth and Pixar’s inability, or want, to push back on it. Onward takes place in a once fantastical world – elves, magic, quests – now, happily (maybe ignorantly) overrun by the wonders of technology. Two brothers – Barley (Chris Pratt playing Chris Pratt as an animated elf) and Ian (Tom Holland) – are gifted a spell by their deceased father that allows them, with the proper ingredients, to see him for just 24 hours. Things go wrong, only the father’s lower half is brought back, and the two brothers must discover their true gifts and their true emotions to put him back together again. Basically, this is a road trip flick through a magical world now turned corporate (and yes, I do think Pixar is saying something here) with Pratt as the big, dumb loser of a brother and Holland as the scared wuss. It has moments (a car chase with a gang of motorcycle pixies is gorgeously done) where you can see the Pixar DNA fully flowing, that maddeningly simple mixture of emotion and action and humor just cracking along, but they are sandwiched between truly treacle globs of heavy-handed emotion. It’s as if someone up high was like, “Whoa, this film could get really weird. Can we do half weird, half-Disney?” A character in this film is a pair of pants with a fake body belted to it and honestly, the filmmakers don’t do much with it. It’s an absolute weirdness generator and it plays out as an obnoxious source of sentimentality. It feels like two studios are pushing against each other in Onward and as hard as they shove back and forth, they can never fully come together.
One Last Thought:
Tom Holland is not a good voice actor. He always seems perched to say another line and because Ian is given the lion’s share of the cheese in this flick, it makes many of the lines totally disingenuous.
Another Last Thought:
For a film that has a main character that is literally just a crotch and legs there isn’t a single dick joke in this film. I know, it’s aimed at kids, but c’mon guys, dick jokes are funny.
