Mark Reviews Movies: ONWARD

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 5, 2020

With enough time and exposure, every wonder of the world, every new idea, and every piece of novel technology eventually become ordinary. We become accustomed to things, forget about how special they actually are, and just take them for granted. If magic actually existed, as it does in the world of Onward, we might eventually feel the same way about it, too.

That's kind of the premise of this film, which creates a world in which magic does exist but was mostly forgotten, as people realized that it was difficult to perform and that technology could make the lives of people easier. Everyone could have access to an oven to heat their food, but only those with the skills and the patience to conjure fire could cook using magic. As time progressed, magic became a thing of legend, fodder for stories, and the staple of a popular role-playing game.

The funny thing about this world is that it is, on its face, filled with magic. If humans exist, they're in the background of this tale. Instead, this is a world mostly populated by creatures that we immediately recognize as fantastical—elves and trolls and imps and centaurs and manticores, among many others. Their world is familiar enough. People live regular lives in the suburbs of a big city, but the history of this realm's architecture has defined its current design. The suburban homes are shaped like mushrooms, and the skyscrapers of the metropolis are fashioned like the towers of an ancient castle, with turrets and spires jutting out from the buildings or acting as caps to at their tops.

Such are the particulars of this world, crafted with a lot of care and attention to detail by director Dan Scanlon and his team of animators and designers. The whole scheme of this realm is a running gag: What would it look like if a world of Medieval fantasy underwent an technological revolution and evolved from that starting point in time? For the story, the important point is what it would be like if a world of obviously fantastical creatures took their fantastical nature for granted. From there, it's entirely about how much in life—the seemingly ordinary things that really are quite magical when you look at the big picture—we can take for granted.

The main characters are a pair of brothers named Ian (voice of Tom Holland) and Barley Lightfoot (voice of Chris Pratt), two elves with blue skin and pointy ears. Their father died before the younger Ian was born, so they have been raised by their mother Laurel (voice of Julia Louis-Dreyfus). It's Ian's 16th birthday at the story's start, and after an old college friend of his father's tells the kid how confident and full of personality the teen's old man was, Ian decides to become more like the man he never met.

The plan fails, but Laurel has a gift for her sons from their father. It's an old wizarding staff, a special gem, and a spell that the father learned. The spell can bring a dead person back to life for one day.

Barley fails, but alone in his room, Ian succeeds—at least partially. Tapping into magical powers he didn't know he had, Ian conjures his father's body up to its waist before the gem shatters. Using his knowledge of a role-playing game (It's based on real life!"), Barley decides to take his brother and their father's legs on a quest—in his old, troublesome van—to find another one of the gems in order to complete the spell.

It's pretty simple in terms of story (The screenplay was written by Scanlon, Jason Headley, and Keith Bunin), but the details really matter. Here, Barley determines that the starting point for any quest is the local tavern, and despite its location in an old and dark forest, the public house, where so many adventurers once discovered and planned dangerous journeys into the unknown, has been transformed into a themed family restaurant. Its owner, a once-fierce manticore (voice of Octavia Spencer) who sent many travelers to their victory or doom, now hosts birthday parties and ensures that her customers' appetizers are tasty.

Later, the brothers encounter a gang of sprites, who lost the functional use of their wings long ago and now work as a group to operate motorcycles. As for Laurel's new boyfriend Colt (voice of Mel Rodriguez), he's a cop and a centaur—a noble creature that once could sprint at great speeds—who doesn't need to run. After all, he has a car.

All of this is quite amusing, because the filmmakers are dedicated to a clever gag that extends through the entirety of this world, all of its characters, and the longing heart of its story—about two kids who just want to see a dead parent again or for the first time. As thoroughly designed and implemented as this world may be, it never distracts us from that sad, aching core of the characters' quest (although a subplot involving Laurel looking for her sons with the manticore's help is a bit of a somewhat necessary distraction). Of particular note is how the characters' goals subtly shift as they get closer to the end of the quest. What's gone is gone, and often, it's what or whom is right in front of you that matters.

Onward possesses an admirable degree of imagination, in how devoted the filmmakers are to creating and fleshing out this world. Its heart, though, is even larger, because, just as in life, that's where the magic really is.

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