Near the beginning of quarantine, Pixar, perhaps the most beloved film studio in America, released its newest movie, Onward. And for most people, it was fine. Not great; just good. Certainly not one of the studio’s best, yet respectably in the middle.
Despite the appeal of two of the biggest stars in Hollywood right now, Chris Pratt and Tom Holland, the movie was financially underwhelming. And while this is due almost certainly in part to the current pandemic, it has been agreed by most that this most recent production fails to live up the expectations audiences have built up for the animation studio that brought us Toy Story and The Incredibles.
So what went wrong? What does Onward lack that those other Pixar films apparently have in spades?
It’s important to recognize before we get into our discussion, that Onward is a good movie. In fact, it may even be exceptionally good in the grand scheme of wide release movies. But the lack of excitement it has generated, especially coming from a studio that knows how to make great films, is worth looking into. And to better understand why we all feel like it’s good, just not great, we begin with a discussion of:
Text vs. Texture
When discussing movies, people generally focus on one of two things, text or texture.
The text of a film is its story—how it’s written, its characters and plot. Texture, on the other hand, is basically everything else. It’s the camera framing, the camera movement, the color grading, the wardrobe, the production design, the sets, the special effects, the CGI, the acting, the scoring, the soundtrack, and a thousand other things. If you think of movies as a combination of text and texture, they seem pretty lopsided in one direction.
Yet it’s the script, the black ink on white paper (usually coffee stained and dogeared by the end of the writing process), that is really the most important element of the miracle that is moviemaking. A movie’s success hangs almost exclusively on the skill and perfection of its story.
The anonymous film critic Hulk in an essay on this topic illustrates this by pointing to the differences in Avengers: Infinity War and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. He compares two scenes from these movies, Thanos’s sacrifice of Gamora and the final confrontation between Obi-Wan and Anakin, to understand the effective divide between text and texture. In the former, we witness the dramatic realization that Thanos, despite his cruelty, truly cares for his adopted daughter Gamora but now, in service of his quest, must end her life. It is performed by two of our most talented actors in Hollywood, bolstered by surging music and some of the most impressive special effects to date. Compare this to the similar stakes in Star Wars in which two characters once allied together find themselves in a violent confrontation fueled by lies, jealousy, and opposing ideologies. Yet in this scene the acting is wooden and the dialogue trite; the visual effects are dated and the camera movement is stilted.
Nonetheless, any viewer of both these scenes can tell you which one resonates and which one is forgotten. Because despite the massive gap in texture and technical skill behind these scenes, the story for one works while the other falls flat. The audience has no context for the relationship between Thanos and Gamora; no matter how well their interaction is filmed, it means very little to us. Obi-Wan and Anakin, on the other hand—we’ve watched them share experiences and grow close over the course of three movies. And say what you will about George Lucas’s dialogue, but the man knows how to architect a story.
And again, it all hangs on story. Through the text, movies elicit engagement from their viewers and hopefully produce a feeling of empathy. They do this generally in the same way that we create empathy in everyday life, through exposure and time spent together, coming to know one another. (As an aside: this is why TV is so successful and you’ll see such consistently high RottenTomatoes score for shows despite their clear budgetary and technical restraints—they’re able to spend a lot of time with their characters.)
The effects of empathy building are most clear when considering suffering. Though I may learn of a group’s persecution long ago in a history class or hear of an individual’s pain in a news program, it will never have the same effect as witnessing someone’s suffering first hand, spending time alongside them, getting to know their attitude and reflections on their own suffering.
The Pixar classic Up demonstrates best this understanding of storytelling. For ten straight minutes at the beginning it brings you into the lives of these characters, showing you their desires and motivations, and having lingered in their lives, it only then sucker punches you with its tragedy. There are, of course, some shortcuts. You can always kick a dog for easy empathy building, but more often for a powerful story, it requires laying that foundation of time and character work.
None of this is to say that texture isn’t important. I want to do more than reiterate the critiques of style over substance—texture and style are crucial. A good movie will have the whole package. And on top of that, some texture is so powerful to completely overwrite the strength of the text. Some people cannot enjoy films of a certain genre or movies that are animated. There are some people that, despite the storytelling craft of Pixar’s films, can never really get into them.
Beyond this, some viewers seem to resent certain texts, particularly those they view as emotionally manipulative. For these audience members, Steven Spielberg is probably the prime offender; his films are so incredibly potent in communicating the one, singular theme he is trying to convey in any given scene. Though the minority, it’s not uncommon for individuals to grow up loving the work of Spielberg, but once they go through their teenage or college years and develop some cinematic literacy, they become turned off to the heavy handedness of Spielberg’s work. Rather than viewing this as a weakness, however, this seems to be more of an idolatry of narrative ambiguity. Don’t tell me what to feel. But the effectiveness of Spielberg’s drama for so many viewers is proof of its cinematic weight.
The text of a movie, its story and characterizations, is the skeleton that the rest of the film hangs on. There may be flashes of artful cinematography, brilliant performances, or choreographed action, but what keeps a film in the souls of its viewers years afterward, is the empathy that it created inside of them.
The Story of Onward
On paper it works. It has most of our classic Pixar tropes: an aloof main character, friendships prioritized over romance, big emotional finale, the usual beats. But in reality it ends up not working, and as you might suspect, I think it has to do with the cogs of its story.
The first thing worth mentioning is its setting. It’s a fantasy world brought into the modern day. There’s a lot of neat things you can do with this idea, and unlike the recent film Bright which has a similar premise, Onward actually delivers on some of those fun opportunities (watching a Centaur get into a car is always funny). But if we’ve learned anything, you can’t build a successful story on that kind of texture. Instead, we have to ask, what does this setting add to our story?
Unfortunately the answer seems to be: not a whole lot. Sure, it allows us to get into the unique plot of bringing a character back from the dead for a day, but you can have magic in your story without the elves and the backstory of forgetting magic in favor of convenience. There are some themes touched on regarding embracing your inner warrior, but what does that have to do with Ian and Barley and their father?
Which brings us to the bigger issue in this story: what is the deal with Ian and Barley and their father? We have the potential for something really meaningful in this story (which we’ll talk about more in a moment), but in the runtime of the movie, we end up only partially interested in their conflict. We care, but not enough to achieve that cathartic rush at the end of the film.
Before going further with this, I should probably mention that Onward’s dilemma is directly based on the life of the film’s director, Dan Scanlon, whose father died shortly after Scanlon’s birth when his older brother was only three. In his adolescence, Scanlon had an intense desire to know his father but had only an old recording of him to listen to. This is a powerful story and a real story, but its reality does not inherently translate to empathy toward what’s happening on the screen. Just because the main character has real issues, doesn’t mean its viewers will relate. And as we discussed above, most people may be able to instinctively sympathize with the shortcut of a missing parent, but that won’t get us to those stronger moments of drama that we want.
So what exactly is wrong with Onward’s story? At its core, it’s that the audience doesn’t feel like anything needs fixing.
You may think to yourself, of course there is something to fix in this story—Ian wants to meet his dad! But that’s not really an issue that demands resolution; someone wanting something doesn’t deserve to be fixed. Now, if the movie showed us just how much Ian needed to meet his father in order to resolve some sort of pain or shortcoming in his life, then we’d start to be on the right track. If the movie illustrated a connection between Ian’s inability to make friends at school and his need for a father figure, that could work. Instead, what we get is a family and a main character that seem mostly functional. If the movie never happened, we could imagine them ending up OK.
This lack of conflict is nowhere more detrimental than in the central relationship between Ian and Barley. This sort of movie makes or breaks on the dynamic between those two characters, but you get the impression that they’re mostly fine. Ian may be a little embarrassed of his brother, but it doesn’t seem like a big deal. Even when Ian blows up at Barley in the third act for being a screw-up, it doesn’t resonate, because we feel like the conflict between them isn’t that deep and will wash over in a few hours. While the movie should have been building the internal conflict between them—focusing on potential issues like Barley resentment of Ian’s ability to do magic—it rather spends its time on external conflicts like escaping the police, answering quest riddles, and other plot elements.
Compare this to some of Pixar’s other iconic duos: Carl and Russell, Marlin and Dory, Joy and Sadness, or Woody and Buzz. Their core desires and beliefs drive all of their interactions. This is especially the case for Woody and Buzz in whose movie the plot is completely secondary to the personal conflict between the two characters.
Onward fails to build the empathy in audiences it needs because it devotes less time to the characters than to elaborate world-building and adventure gags. Though not inherently bad, it’s worth noting that potentially the most powerful scene for the story, Barely’s final memory of their father, isn’t even shown in the movie. Again, contrast this with Up or especially Finding Nemo and how it brings us into the world of its characters. In the first scene, by Marlin and Coral’s planning and the barracuda’s vicious attack, it becomes painfully clear what Marlin’s insecurities and fears for Nemo are and why they’re there.
Yet all of this could be excused if it weren’t for the importance of text and story. You see, because Onward only partially sets up its main character and only half-way develops his relationship with his brother and then only barely makes use of its fantasy setting, it fails to reach the same heights as the other Pixar movies we know and love. It doesn’t have that emotional climax or “moment of transcendence.” In other Pixar films, this would be scenes like when Andy reaffirms his love for Woody, or when Buzz learns the truth about himself, or when Riley finally learns to cry in front of her parents, or in Coco, when the final song leads Miguel’s great-grandmother to remember.
Perhaps in Onward’s defense, it’s worth mentioning that its story is actually trying something harder than these other movies: the bait-and-switch climax. It sets you up for one type of story—about a boy finally meeting his father—and then hits you with Ian’s realization that his older brother Barley was really the father he had his whole life. It’s deep, rich stuff. But, it doesn’t have that transcendent feeling because Onward doesn’t do the needed legwork at the beginning and middle to make us care about the ending the way we should.
Again, Onward is a good movie—an excellent movie. The ideas it’s playing with are worth exploring. But the movie will ultimately fall short of its peers because, while it has texture and style and the gorgeous animation that Pixar promises, it doesn’t develop Ian and Barley and the rest of the text.