Onward

Release Date: March 6, 2020

Watch Date: September 5, 2024

“In Disney and Pixar’s Onward, two teenage elf brothers Ian and Barley Lightfoot (voices of Tom Holland and Chris Pratt) get an unexpected opportunity to spend one more day with their late dad and embark on an extraordinary quest aboard Barley’s epic van Guinevere. Like any good quest, their journey is filled with magic spells, cryptic maps, impossible obstacles, and unimaginable discoveries. But when the boys’ fearless mom Laurel (voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfus) realizes that her sons are missing, she teams up with a part-lion, part-bat, part-scorpion, former warrior – aka The Manticore (voice of Octavia Spencer) – and heads off to find them. Perilous curses aside, this one magical day could mean more than any of them ever dreamed.”

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   Watching a movie about boys who lost their dad far too early in their life is…probably a little bit harder for Bob to watch than he’ll admit.

   See, he did lose his stepfather, at a much older age than Barley, and he did have to help raise two other little boys, one about Ian’s age at the time, who didn’t really remember him, and who didn’t have any other father figure to look up to. I’m proud of him every single day for what he stepped up and did, and for the father figure that he became. I think, personally, that when he watches this movie he hurts for the boys who have exactly no and four memories of their dad. He wishes he, like them, could say one final word to the man who helped raise him for so many years, and whose shoes he unexpectedly had to fill. I watch and see a story of a boy who became a man far too early, but who stepped up, who loves his sibling with everything he has, and who any reasonable person would see as a hero.

   But maybe I’m biased.

   I think this movie is mostly overlooked because of Covid, releasing in theatres in March 2020 was probably not the greatest thing for Disney – or for any movie studio but Disney is the one I really care about – and it didn’t get the Christmas present debut like Soul did, so it doesn’t have that magic about it either. But it’s a good movie. It’s funny. It has heart. The characters are deep and interesting and believable. And I love the concept of a world so magical that magic becomes uninteresting and tech becomes the accepted practice.

   Industry marches ever onward, even in a world so based on Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy franchises.

   This is a Pixar movie that will make you feel. That’s 1000% all that this Pixar movie is trying to do. If you laugh, great. But that’s not the story it’s trying to tell. It wants to bring you into the experience of losing a parent, of growing up, of hurting, of missing, of desperately wanting to hear stories and find ways to connect to the long lost.

   And that’s a story which a film about two elf brothers and a pair of legs shouldn’t do nearly as well as it does. But that’s the magic of Pixar.

   So don’t overlook this one. Give it a chance. It more than deserves it.