Pixar’s Onward Takes 1 Common Disney Trope & Pushes It A Step Further

For 88 years now, Disney has been releasing animated films with fantastical stories meant to delight children of all ages, creating a legacy of family-friendly entertainment that serves as its own stylistic canon. Sometimes Disney – or their competitors – will release a film that riffs on that style, but generally the decades have done little to whittle away at the formula first introduced with 1937’s Snow White or 1942’s Bambi: whatever struggles the protagonist goes through, they end with a “happily ever after” moment. Interestingly, Disney’s Onward reexamined that trope.

Released theatrically in 2020, Onward is as full of humor as pathos. Teenage elf Ian (Tom Holland) and his older brother Barley (Chris Pratt) live in a fantasy world with supposedly little magic in Onward. On Ian’s 16th birthday, they discover that their long-deceased father was secretly a wizard, and that he left them a way to return him to life for just a day. Unfortunately, the spell goes awry, and they have to race against time in hopes of finishing the spell and giving Ian the chance to say hello to the father he never knew.

Onward Reminds Us To Feel Our Own Feelings But Also Remember Those Around Us

Empathy Might Be An Overused Buzzword These Days, But It’s An Important Part Of Emotional Intelligence

If Onward were a traditional Disney film, the pacing of the emotional climax would have looked something like this:

Ian and Barley find the magical McGuffin with minutes to spare.

The spell works, and we see their dad’s face, alive for the first time in years, looking on at his sons with pride.

Ian barely manages to choke out a “Hi, Dad” through the tears.

Big wholesome family embrace before the spell ends.

Yet that isn’t how the film ends, because it was never telling that kind of story for Onward’s cast of characters. From the beginning of the movie, Ian is repeatedly frustrated by his older brother’s nerdy obsession with fantasy stories and tropes, and yet that frustration blinds him to the realization that Barley is the one who always goes to the mat for him. Throughout their quest to resurrect their father, Barley repeatedly shows he is willing to make any sacrifice necessary – even his beloved van Guinivere – to make sure Ian gets to meet their father.

At the final moment before sunset, with time to complete the spell running out, Ian realizes that Barley is the one who has been supporting him his whole life – and that it’s Barley who is in need of closure. When their father died, Ian was a newborn, but Barley was older, so he’s the one who still remembers him.

Ian may bear the weight of never having known his father in Onward, but it’s Barley who carries the pain of having lost his. It’s a nuanced take on how grief affects us all, and that healing that grief means we have to be open to the idea that while our pain can help us make choices, we must temper it with how we respond to the pain of those we care about.

Onward Had The Kind Of Emotionally Difficult Ending More Disney Movies Should Embrace

“Happily Ever After” Is A Meaningless Concept Because All Stories Inevitably End

Many Disney films, and family films in general, focus on the idea of a “happily ever after” and how that means that everything must either return to the status quo at the end of the film or end in a triumph for the protagonists. Princesses get married to their Prince Charming, kingdoms return to order no matter how much their infrastructure has collapsed, and evil is always vanquished or imprisoned or falls to its death from a great height. But Onward rejects that idea in favor of leaning in to the emotional discomfort at the heart of the story.

“Discomfort” is exactly the word to describe the climax of Onward, and that’s clearly a very intentional choice on the part of the film. After Ian kills the concrete-and-rubble dragon that serves as their quest’s final obstacle, he’s separated from Barley by the pile of the dragon’s remains. He tries to watch Barley’s reunion with their father through a gap in the debris, but slips and loses sight of them just in time to see the sun almost disappear over the horizon.

When he makes it back to his vantage point, it’s just in time to see the few exchange some last words and a single hug before their dad disappears, leaving a grieving Barley behind once again. Ian is brought to tears at the sight, but they are clearly only bittersweet at the worst, because he succeeded in his quest: he helped Barley find the closure that he never would have otherwise had.

Sometimes we lose loved ones to tragedies or accidents; sometimes they don’t die, but are simply forever changed by the circumstances of fate, and sometimes people just leave. Whatever events caused that loss, the grief becomes a weight around our necks, one that grows all the heavier as year by year we add to it with our regrets and painful memories. While Ian begins the film obsessed with finding a way to connect to the father he never knew, he ends it realizing that his own pain about his missed opportunities isn’t the same as his brother’s lifelong grief.

Ian’s childhood still had a loving, supportive figure who was there for him the whole time, helping him learn how to swim and how to drive, but it was Barley, not their father. It’s Barley who has lived a life weighed down by grief, and so it has to be Barley who gets the chance to find even a moment of closure to say that last goodbye he was robbed of so young.

Onward Was A Deeply Personal Film For Dan Scanlon On His Second Directorial Outing

You Can’t Fake Your Way Through Writing About This Kind Of Grief

Onward was the pet project of Dan Scanlon, who started off his career in animation by working on some of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels in 2000 before joining Pixar in 2001 as a storyboard artist, which led to him directing the short film Mater and the Ghost Light, followed by an indie film entitled Tracy, before his first Pixar directorial feature credit, 2013’s Monsters University. After that film, he was encouraged to work on more personal projects, and that’s when he began working on the script that would become Onward.

Scanlon’s idea sprung from his own experiences, which became the blueprint for Ian’s character arc. When Scanlon was only a year old, his father passed away, leaving him with a lifetime of wondering who his father had been as a person. Scanlon also has an older brother, who was three at the time of their tragic loss. Scanlon announced Onward at the 2017 D23 conference, and discussed how the film was inspired by that fundamental experience, as well as by a relative gifting him a cassette tape on which Scanlon’s father could be heard saying two words – “hi” and “bye.”

The genuine pain and loss of his own father clearly influenced Scanlon’s crafting of Onward. Even though he was the director and writer, his lived experiences of grief and years of experience as a storyboard artist both shine through the film’s tight, emotionally intense shots, especially in the emotional climax, as Ian struggles to get just a deliberately framed glimpse of Barley’s tearful meeting with their father.

Unfortunately, Onward failed to find the critical and box office success it deserved. COVID-19 forced theaters to shut down across the United States within two weeks of its release. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but lost to Pixar’s other 2020 release, Soul; while nominated for dozens of other awards that year, it failed to win almost any of them. Yet critical acclaim aside, Onward is a very important journey for its characters, its creator, and any viewer willing to take the time and sit in the discomfort that is necessary for healing grief.