Tuesday, March 10, 2020

Low fantasy


Directed by Dan Scanlon
Written by Jason Headley, Keith Bunin, and Dan Scanlon

Spoiler alert: mild

Pixar has, over the last quarter century, developed a little bit of a formula, and almost all of its movies fit into it, the majority of them turning our eyes to one fanciful hidden world or another, divorced from quotidian human reality to a greater or lesser degree, but nonetheless perceived as quotidian by their inhabitants, who believe they understand (though they're often wrong) the parochial, peculiar, sometimes-obscure logic upon which their crazy worlds run.  And hence all those cartoons about toys and fish and ants and closet monsters and Herman's Head characters and sad, secret superheroes, each one inviting us into its own elaborate and appealing pocket universe that exists alongside the reality we thought we knew but, clearly, never did.

Onward is not a repudiation of that, exactly, but more like a purification of it, which is not necessarily any kind of a good thing, because the other film in the Pixar canon to purify the formula to such a point of diminishing returns is the one that Onward resembles the most, The Good Dinosaur—that is, the one so quickly memory-holed thanks to its artistic and commercial failures that hardly anyone has even noticed the similarities Onward bears to it, despite it being barely four years old.  Maybe that's for the best, since Onward is at least a better movie than The Good Dinosaur, although that's certainly setting a contemptibly low bar for master craftspeople such as work at Pixar, and if you get the sense I'm somewhat damning it with faint praise, well, congratulations on getting ahead of me.

Anyway, the core similarity between the two projects manifests in the world Onward has offered up for us to discover, and, like The Good Dinosaur's, this is a world defined by an event in the distant past that has rendered the fantastic ordinary.  Onward is more explicit about this, which means it at least has a point of view and an intentionality to it (it's literally about magic being all-but-banished from its world), but the outcome's kind of the same, and it's mostly the flavor that's different. So while The Good Dinosaur, which posited that dinosaurs survived and evolved towards intelligence and agricultural civilization, erred on the side of a confounding vagueness about everything it did, Onward takes the opposite tack, and decides that when its high fantasy realm, populated by elves and centaurs and manticores and the like (but not humans), hit upon science and technology as offering a more convenient way of life than wizardry, their society abandoned its fantastic mode little by little until, at the last, their world degenerated into one gallingly precise replica of our own.  In other words, The Good Dinosaur signaled the emptiness of its imagination by a conspicuous absence of details; Onward signals its by filling every frame it can with details that say nobody could be bothered to take it seriously for so much as a nanosecond.  Consider, for example, a vehicle for centaur cops that, ha ha, can't comfortably accommodate the centaur cop who drives it, because it was designed for the humans who—again—never existed here.  Maybe it's a comment on systemic elf supremacy.  Or maybe it means the Pixar entry it really most resembles is Cars, in that the answer to the immortal question "who made you?" is "shut up."

Beyond the downright infinite possibilities for nitpicking, it also tends to defeat the purposes of doing "fantasy" as a genre in the first place, though at least on this latter count one of our protagonists, Barley Lightfoot (Chris Pratt), would passionately agree.  We meet Barley and his younger brother Ian (Tom Holland) on the day of the latter's sixteenth birthday, whereupon we are acquainted with both Barley's hopeless nostalgia for a vanished magical past, expressed mainly through tabletop "historical" gaming, and Ian's hopeless pubescent awkwardness, expressed mainly through the fact that his best and only friends are his loser live-at-home adult brother, his mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and his mom's boyfriend, centaur cop Colt Bronco (Mel Rodriguez), and even then, the only one whose presence Ian appears to do more than merely tolerate is the one who gave birth to him.  Missing from this picture, of course, is Ian and Barley's father, Wilden (Kyle Bornheimer), an accountant who perished from elf cancer so early in their lives that Barley has but three or four reliable memories of him, and Ian has none at all.  But theirs is a world with a tiny bit of magic left, as Ian and Barley find out when Laurel presents them with a gift held in trust for sixteen years.

It turns out that, as dad approached the end of his span, he was drawn toward the obsolete occult practices of his forebears, and his gift is a wizard's staff, a so-called phoenix stone, and a set of instructions on how to bring him back, but only for twenty-four hours.  Barley, despite the intensity of his love for the old time magic, has not the inborn talent for it; Ian, however, does, but fucks up the spell halfway through, wasting the phoenix stone, which nets the brothers half a dad, specifically the bottom.  They determine to acquire another stone to complete the ritual, which means a quest across southern Elfifornia on the back of Barley's noble steed, Guinevere (a 70s stoner van with a unicorn airbrushed on the side), their dad's ambulatory khakis in tow.  But their efforts are frustrated at every turn, and that twenty-four clock never stopped.

I hate to harp on it, but it never amounts to much of a quest, even on the half-lark sub-Goonies level we're meant to take it at, and it's hard to get over feeling that it ought to have been bursting with creativity.  Then you learn at one point in development it was, and you just get sad about it—numerous ideas, from a magic talking tree ala Pocahontas that found itself, over the centuries, stuck in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, to mermaids, to other things besides, were cut out of the final product in favor of character designs and character concepts that better fit the utter everydayness of Onward's world, wherein the maximum non-humanness of any entity appears to have been determined by virtue of whether their ill fit into an automobile was "funny."  It's a joke repeated three times with three different creature classes, and it never is.  The last one, a clutch of fairies who've forgotten how to fly and so ride human-sized motorcycles, isn't just another aggressive example of the world's incoherence, it's also the most counterproductive demystification of a world that still needs to be some kind of weird to justify its $200 million existence.  And the offense they take to Barley's clumsiness leads to a chase sequence where the peril is, explicitly, the difficulty of merging into traffic.

This is, it's said, a very personal story to director and co-writer Dan Scanlon, which is transparently not true: it's a very personal character dynamic to him—like Ian and Barley, Scanlon and his brother also lost their father at a tender age—but that's a bit different, and at least goes some way to explaining why his level of shit-giving about the story overall tops out at D&D references.  (Certainly, his directorial debut for Pixar, Monsters University, fails to explain anything on that count: that film indulges as deeply in Pixar's "take a magical world, make it comedically mundane" formula as anything, but it never remotely feels like somebody took wonder out back to rough it up.  And while I know nobody else on Earth feels this way, probably including Dan Scanlon himself, Monsters U. is very possibly my second-favorite of all of Pixar's films, after Toy Story 3.)  Anyway, to his credit, Scanlon does get that character dynamic really, really right, and everything great about Onward flows from Barley and Ian's prickly affection for one another and the credibility of their relationship, largely defined by adolescent self-centeredness that doesn't quite obscure the fact that, at bottom, they can still rely on each other, because they're all they've got.

Now, their adventure is underpopulated, only occasionally exciting, and cliche as hell—the good stuff is all stolen, and even not all the stolen stuff is good (the Weekend At Bernie's cosplay for dad arguably doesn't even make it all the way to "reference joke")—but it does leave plenty of room for Onward to mine what humor it can from Ian and Barley's interactions and Barley's dungeon master routine for his sorcerer's apprentice.  These are not all great gags, either, of course, particularly insofar as the net effect is one more trivialization of this world's nascent magical properties.  But they can be funny, and the in-dialogue title drop—O is for onward!—is as winning a line as any in a Pixar cartoon in years, eye-rollingly goofy yet, somehow, rousing all the same, the first moment here that finally brushes against something epic, even if intentional anti-epicness is the film's whole deal.

Now, I think it's a fair argument that this character dynamic is still incomplete: Onward is just irrationally eager to sideline Laurel, who might, you know, have some personal interest in the outcome of her sons' quest—Ian and Barley never even mention it to her, and whatever thoughts she had on the subject are elided more-or-less entirely—and while that makes some sense in keeping the scenario clean and focused on what Scanlon was invested in, it doesn't even get the job done on that count; some studio note or another, or maybe Scanlon's own belated realization that he also still has a mom, wound up with Laurel getting pushed into a deeply spurious buddy subplot of her own, chasing down her wayward kids (she gets a sidekick in the form of one the few entities that Ian and Barley meet whom we can reasonably call a character, Octavia Spencer's midlife-crisis manticore), and while it's never outright bad, it's something of an intermittent distraction from what the movie actually cares about.

Or, maybe that's not fair, because it clearly cares about something else other than brotherly love, it's just that in 2020 I don't know if I should care about it enough to award it extra points.  Nevertheless, I still do, and Onward is one more confirmation of Pixar's technical leadership in their field, even if it's a field they keep narrowing with every other film they put out; like The Good Dinosaur and Toy Story 4, Onward is really damn invested in photorealism, though this time the goal of the photorealism—grounding things further and further into the abysmally mundane—is a bit more obvious than the value of Toy Story 4's disgustingly dusty floors (speaking of dust, one of Onward's first images led me to almost shout "Jesus, Ian, clean your fucking room!" at a shaft of light that hits so many pretty shimmering dust particles hanging in the air that they're best described as a "fog").

But you can genuinely believe that Ian's room is full of dust, because you so readily believe that Ian genuinely has skin made of skin cells, and blood vessels filled with blood beneath.  (Somebody has to eventually realize that the pursuit of photorealism is the pursuit of beauty in increasingly-gross biological reality, right?)  Still, it is beautiful, or at least beautifully-realized—the cartoony character designs and occasionally-cartoony character animation are far less jarring against the realist backdrops than they were in The Good Dinosaur, which attempted the same sort of thing and failed pretty badly at it.  Partly this is because they're just better designs (non-elven characters, I'm afraid, need not apply), but it's mostly thanks to all the extra attention paid to the bodies that are most frequently onscreen.  And it's kind of amazing that they can coexist at all, because Onward represents the moment where you start to earnestly wonder why Pixar doesn't just, like, film actual stuff and composite the cartoons into it later, because it looks exactly the same.  And the only reason you can think of is that it's easier to control the lighting of a dirt road at night when the dirt road is inside a digital box.

Even so, it's getting harder with every passing year to praise Pixar for simply having the biggest computers, even when their house aesthetic is intelligently applied.  What ultimately lifts Onward up out of the lower tier of the studio is a climax that only barely feels like it's actually being built-up to over the course of a vignettish (and frequently underwhelming) adventure, but which is still extraordinary on its merits, at last finding the Scanlon who helmed Monsters U. intact: it offers a bittersweet emotional maturity within its studio-standard heartbreak that only Scanlon's other Pixar film has ever quite achieved.  And, for what it's worth—and it's worth plenty—it also finally gives this putatively-magical quest a radical monster for us to gawk at, instead of just the finer points of elf skin rendering and the uncomfortable reality of an elf crotch, which confronts us constantly with the fact that, in life, dad must have dressed to the left, and evidently wanted everyone to know it.

In the end, what Onward doesn't do matters less than what it does, even when the list of what it doesn't do is extremely, exhaustingly long.  It's a worthy addition to Pixar's line—it's hard not to think they've fallen somewhat, but they surely haven't fallen as hard or as fast as their corporate siblings at WDAS—but Onward is flawed at its very foundations, and on top of that it's flawed in other ways that aren't even related to its ill-defined underpinnings.  And even if it's good, I really wish it were better than it is—because it could have been.

Score: 7/10

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