102 min | PG | March 6, 2020 | Walt Disney Pictures
Two elf brothers get a spell that can resurrect their dead father for one day. The magic misfires and brings back only his legs. What follows is a road trip to find the rest of him before sundown.
Ian and Barley Lightfoot are teenage elves in a suburban fantasy world that forgot it was magic. Their father died before Ian was born. On Ian’s sixteenth birthday, the brothers receive a wizard’s staff and a spell that can bring their dad back for one day. The spell half-works. It conjures the lower half of their father and sends the boys on a quest to complete it before the sun sets. Onward is a road movie about brothers, and underneath that it is a film about the parent you never met and the sibling who filled the gap.
Tom Holland plays Ian as an anxious kid who keeps a list of things he wants to fix about himself. Holland gives him a cracking voice and a habit of talking himself out of every brave act before he attempts it. Chris Pratt plays Barley as the loud older brother who treats a tabletop fantasy game as historical fact. Pratt commits to the character’s belief so fully that Barley’s ridiculousness becomes his strength. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays their mother Laurel with a weary tenderness, and Octavia Spencer plays a tavern-keeper Manticore who has traded her adventuring days for a family restaurant.
Dan Scanlon directs from a script he wrote with Keith Bunin and Jason Headley, and he builds the world on a single visual joke. Unicorns root through garbage cans like raccoons. Pixies ride motorcycles in gangs. The production design renders a strip-mall civilization where dragons became house pets and magic became inconvenient. The animation lights the quest at golden hour and pushes the brothers toward a literal sunset deadline, so the warmth of the color drains as the clock runs down.
The film knows exactly what it wants its ending to be, and it spends the whole runtime aiming the audience at the wrong target. Ian wants one perfect day with his father. The film has the discipline to deny him the obvious version of that wish and give him something truer instead. The quest mechanics are familiar and the jokes land more often than they soar. Onward earns its final turn because it understood from the start that the dad was never the point.