Onward is Pixar’s latest film about two brothers, Barley and Ian, and their quest to bring back their father. On the surface, it’s a fun family-friendly movie with the typical Pixar plot structure. However, there are a lot of details that I noticed while watching this movie that constantly played with the idea of Chekov’s Gun. Which in cinematic terms, means that everything in your movie must have a purpose. If you’re making a joke or trying to focus on something in a scene, you need to have a reason for doing so. What I mean is that every joke has a setup, and a payoff. There are no Family Guy cutaway gags in this movie.
Along with doing the comedy bits right, this story does have a heart to it. If you’ve watched the trailer, you’d think that this is a movie about a son trying to connect with his father, but really what this film is about is brotherly love. That’s the emotional core of this movie, because both Ian, and Barley couldn’t be more different from one another. But along the way, they connect with each other in all the ways that Ian had wanted to with his father, but never could. Onward is a film with some emotional moments as a result of it hinging on this theme. Somehow Pixar has figured out a way to make their films more emotional for their audience in recent years, and I give them props for being able to accomplish this.
To top it all off, this film is also able to work in an element of social commentary, and to be clear I’m not talking about anything inherently political, like in Zootopia. What I mean is I felt like this film did a good job at poking fun at the absurdity of modern society. For example, there is a joke in this film with biker pixies that have very short tempers. They are quick to threaten a gas station clerk, who accidentally hit one of them in the head, with violence. Or when the two brothers pull in to an insidious looking, old tavern, only to realize when they walk in, that it’s been turned into a family-style restaurant. Overall, I felt like the filmmakers did a good job with the way they executed this.
In general, I will say that I liked this film, because it really paid attention to the details. It felt like everything, even the stuff I might have forgotten about had a purpose in the story. It’s a movie I’d recommend you go see with your family. Because it’s able to make jokes that even I as a 21-year-old man found funny, have emotional moments that resonate with its audience, and have some cultural relevance, besides the fact that it is a Pixar movie.
