Onward
Ten Second Review: With some touching moments and lots of family fun, it’s good effort from Pixar. It just feels like it’s missing the spark of some of their classics.
At this point it’s rather well publicised that Pixar has this list of rules it wants its films to adhere to. These rules aren’t things like “The runtime can’t exceed X” or “There must be this many characters”, they’re more like notes on storytelling. Things like “You admire a character for trying more than for their successes”. For years I’ve enjoyed grappling with them and applying them to all sorts of films and narratives. The problem with having things like these rules is that they can bite you when you ignore them.
Onward is quite a nice film. To start it looks stunning! The ending certainly fills your heart and really takes note of the rules Pixar has set itself. There’s a degree of subversion and you really feel that it shouldn’t have ended any other way. The journeys the characters go on seems to build them into more formed and nuanced figures and the comedy (when it lands) plays well. It is apologetically a quest film that is literally made in the aesthetic of a classic quest. The irony is that the film lacks the magic that so many Pixar films are filled with and where the writers depart from their own rules may be the answer to the missing spark.
“Coincidences that get characters into trouble are great; coincidences that get them out of it are cheating.”
What this really underpins is at the heart of so many people’s gripes with so many films. If a character gets lucky then you don’t feel as though they’ve grown on their journey. In Onward, our main character is consistently told the perfect spells for the situation and has little trouble picking up these skills that we’ve been told are incredibly difficult. It’s basically a case of “Problem? Spell!” which isn’t rewarding for character or audience. The solution to this, as Pixar well know, is to have the character use spells that aren’t designed for the situation but could work anyway. If you have to get a person over a gap, don’t use a levitate spell, blast them over or accidentally transform them into a bird!
“Discount the first thing that comes into your mind; get the obvious out of the way and surprise yourself!”
The disappointing thing is that Pixar are capable of making great films and you don’t need to look beyond elements of this film to see that. Setting your film in a world of magic is not inherently bad but the way you approach that world will define how your characters have to make choices. If there are no choices but perfect options one after another, then they don’t have the fully fulfilling journey that they or the audience could have.
“You’ve got to keep mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer.”
This is still a good film, I certainly wouldn’t recommend against seeing it, and in a world of sequels an original film does bare interest. It just doesn’t quite have the Pixar magic that you hope for.
