Pixar Pint #22: Onward

A movie often forgotten on account of its release date. Did it deserve to be?

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Jun 06, 2023

Welcome back to Pixar Pints, our two-summer-long journey through all 26 Pixar films in release order.

It’s impossible to discuss Onward without mentioning when it came out: March 6, 2020. The movie got a theatrical release…for about a week. Then everything shut down and Onward only grossed $142 million worldwide against a budget of $175-200 million.

Perhaps auspiciously for Disney, the company had just launched its Disney+ streaming service in November 2019. After a digital release on March 20, Disney made the film available to all Disney+ subscribers on April 3, ensuring Pixar fans still had ample opportunity to enjoy it. But even at the time, Onward seemed like it just kinda got lost in the shuffle, and—fair warning—if discussing the spring 2020 lockdowns and the rest of the early pandemic sends you to bad mental places, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.

All of the everything going on in the world made media at large seem less consequential to a lot of people. I mean this in two ways. First, obviously a lot of brainspace was dominated by the whole, y’know, world-changing virus, and it was way harder to get excited for creative projects. But, second, even if we did get excited for them, the pandemic in some way diminished that excitement. Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia is probably my favorite album of the year, but it was released in late March, and it wasn’t as impactful when it was impossible for fans like me to go out and dance to these songs at bars and clubs, let alone for Dua to tour. Movies that were clearly meant to be experienced in theatres were still being released with theatres shut down, greatly hampering the viewing experience and reducing their perceived value.

This isn’t to say media was nowhere—we had to pass the time somehow—but Onward just wasn’t what got the people going. Everyone was talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Tiger King or which shows were coming out of retirement to produce a Zoom special. And I think the reason is obvious: these things all originally dropped during lockdown, not just before it. Onward dropped while the world was still mostly open, got about a week in the sun, then had its timeline hastily revised after everything turned apocalyptic.

This movie would almost certainly be remembered far more fondly if it was released directly to Disney+ on March 20. Disney understood this and recovered to release Soul, Luca, and Turning Red straight to the service in the two years that followed.

None of this says anything about the actual content of the film. What was that like?

Let’s get into it.

Onward quick facts

Release date: March 6, 2020 | Director: Dan Scanlon | Music: Mychael and Jeff Danna

Starring: Tom Holland (Ian), Chris Pratt (Barley), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Laurel), Octavia Spencer (The Manticore)

John Ratzenberger as: Fenwick, the construction worker who’s also a cyclops

Budget: $175-200 million | Box office: $142 million

Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost to…Pixar’s Soul. Okay, wow, spoilers. Sorry!

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 10/10 | I won’t pretend to be an expert on the modern fantasy aesthetic but I was thoroughly enthralled. It reminded me of the Percy Jackson series in that it made me feel like I was watching a fantasized version of a world I had experienced.

Animation: 10/10 | Pixar has this mastered by this point. My favorite part is when the curse becomes a dragon by pulling out chunks of the school building.

Story: 9/10 | Ian’s realization that Barley had been a father figure to him the whole time is truly touching. My dad’s still alive but he spent most of my childhood either working or sleeping, so I never really felt connected to him in the way many sons do to their father. My older brother, on the other hand, introduced me to a lot of culture and habits that are still a big part of me today. I relate to this, even if it’s not a 1-to-1 comparison.

Characters: 8/10 | It’s a pretty pared-down ensemble compared to most Pixar films, but it still works. Ian and Barley feel like real brothers who existed and grew up together in modern North America. “Retired badass is convinced to go on one last ride” is usually a fun trope and The Manticore is no exception. This section gains a point for finally having Pixar’s first openly gay character1 but loses the same point right back because the character is a cop who gets almost no development.

Acting: 10/10 | It’s the Tom Holland and Chris Pratt show. Love him or hate him, Pratt is an incredible entertainer.

Music: 7/10 | It’s there. It didn’t stand out to me but it didn’t ruin anything either. It did its job.

Final score: 9/10 | This movie’s release date is a shame. It’d be a lot more beloved if it got a fair shake.

Leah

Aesthetic: 9/10 | I loved how it was Dungeons & Dragons meets 2020s USA. You have magic and still decide to build an overcrowded highway! They had a lot of fun playing with and subverting western fantasy tropes and I’m here for it.

Animation: 9/10 | My favorite bit of animation was the smoke that came from the curse. Very dynamic!

Story: 10/10 | This was a very satisfying, touching story. The concept of the quest to bring their dad back for a day was well done, with obstacles both fantastical and mundane.

Characters: 9/10 | The main duo of Ian and Barley played off each other very well. Their personality differences helped create the conflict that moved the story forward. There weren’t a lot of side characters but I have to note that The Manticore was hilarious. I guess I should also mention Disney’s First Openly Gay Character of the Week had a throwaway line in this movie. So brave.

Acting: 9/10 | Great performances by the cast here! Pixar has a high standing when it comes to acting and this is no exception.

Music: 9/10 | Really good! I think it added a lot to giving the movie a fantastical atmosphere.

Final score: 9/10 | This is a very sweet story with a super fun premise. Well woven tale with plenty of Easter eggs for the fantasy/D&D fans among us.

Maddy

I am writing this review like five days after actually watching Onward, and that time has done nothing to either boost its score or hinder its score. Heck, I don’t even really have much to say about this movie. I feel bad it’s become forgotten amongst the crowd because of its March 2020 release, which was…a not good time to release movies.

It’s overall fine with a really strong ending, but it’s nothing crazy or exciting. Yet it’s a 7/10! Other studios would kill for their most “okay” films to be 7/10s.

It’s carried by its aesthetic and world, but that’s okay. It’s enjoyable, but—as I said earlier—sadly forgettable because our world didn’t wanna give it a chance (for reasons entirely out of its control).

Final score: 44/60 or 7/10

David

Aesthetic: I really like how they integrated the fantasy elements into a modern-ish world. It’s amusing that even in a world so fantastical, some things (like poor infrastructure) can’t really be avoided.

Animation: Good as always—the way that the pants were orchestrated in their movements was wonderfully fluid. These first two categories are at this point very lightly weighted into my full scoring of the film because it’s evident that this is the standard we should be holding these films to.

Story: Ian + Barley’s arc coming to completion was really, really good. The rest of it felt nonsensical and simultaneously rushed and dragging. Quite a few of what felt like loose ends to me were not really resolved, and the main through line of the film just felt like a cheap ten-minute resolution. I spent 90% of the film waiting to see how they tied it all together and then they did it with duct tape and promises.

Characters: It’s fine. I feel like they needed to give a little more depth to basically every character in the ensemble for the emotionally hefty climax of the film to really hit its mark. Also, ACAB, and deciding to arbitrarily make the cop gay doesn’t win you any points with me. Mickey Mouse casting.

Acting: Tom Holland is pretty good. Chris Pratt does Chris Pratt things and I’m frankly pretty over that whole show. He plays Chris Pratt regardless of the role he takes on, and there’s only so many ways to dress up the same archetype before it gets wildly tired.

Music: This is one of the bright spots of the movie, but even then, it’s pretty standard “Pixar whimsy”—it does its job to build the atmosphere of the film throughout, but I’m not going to pretend it does anything particularly fantastically.

Final score: 3/10 | I believe the kids would call this a flop era.

Final notes

So, the elephant in the room. That pink cyclops you see in the shot between Leah’s and Maddy’s reviews, that’s Officer Specter. She is canonically lesbian, but it’s easy to miss and easy to ignore; she offhandedly refers to her “girlfriend’s daughter” at one point in the conversation with who she thinks is fellow officer Colt Bronco,2 as seen in the aforementioned shot. It never comes up again.

It’s not the first time LGBTQ+ characters have been visible onscreen in a Pixar film—there were blink-and-you-miss-it lesbian couples in Finding Dory and Toy Story 4—but it’s the first time a character has spoken a line in reference to their own queerness. It was…not received as well as Disney-Pixar hoped it would be.

To the film’s credit, they casted an openly lesbian actress, Lena Waithe, to voice Specter. On the negative side…well, our reviews have already gotten into why we (four LGBTQ+ people) felt her character was poor representation, and I won’t blabber on about it any longer. But any representation was enough to draw scrutiny from countries in which homosexuality is illegal or (in fewer cases) still socially taboo. The film was banned in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; the line was changed to “sister’s daughter” in Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, and “partner’s daughter” in Hungary, Poland, and Russia.

At the end of the day, this was a masterclass in how to do LGBTQ+ representation wrong. It’s hard to say the movie suffers for it given the character is so unimportant to its overall plot, but its reception definitely suffered. It was another thing the movie had going against it.