Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
What do you get when you blend Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons and The Blues Brothers into a fantasy-filled animated barrage of pop culture references? Normally, a meaninglessly meandering movie, but in the hands of Disney and Pixar, it’s something still meandering and mediocre, but visually stunning.
This story is centred on your average teenage boy who has issues fitting it and an embarrassing family to boot. Except there is one notable exception – he happens to be an elf with a spark of magic.
Disney and Pixar’s most recent animated fantasy Onward creates a world in which modern technology comes to replace magic because technological innovations are easier to master than magic. Right off the bat, as my mother can attest, that’s a bizarre and patently untrue idea – there is no way that a video call is easier than flinging Floo powder into a fire and then pushing your green face through a fireplace.
Amidst this twilight zone of technology and magic existing side by side where hissing unicorns replace racoons and centaurs, Onward tells the story of two elvish brothers – Ian (Tom Holland) and Barley Lightfoot (Chris Pratt) who live with their mother Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and their pet mini-dragon Lazy.
Ian and Barley are the latest and bluest inductees into Disney’s Dead Parent Society (sorry to all the dead parents out there, it’s not your fault the Disney formula has played harpsichord with our heart strings for the last 70 years). Their dad passed away before Ian ever had a chance to meet him and on his 16th birthday, his mother gives him a magic staff and a gem, left for him and his brother by their dad before ‘the sickness’ took him.
The spell to bring him back goes terribly wrong, because of course it does; “give two kids a magic staff and only leave them with a single difficult spell to raise the dead” sounds like a recipe for success, right?
Well, as a result of the charm catastrophe, only the bottom half of their dad is brought into being and they have to race against the clock to find the macguffin that will give them a few minutes with their entire dad instead of just his super-lanky legs.
Of course, the magic is in the journey itself but is this magic that will stay with us, like Toy Story or Inside Out or Aladdin (1992)? I doubt it.
Yes, the voices are incredible, with Octavia Spencer voicing The Manticore rediscovering her wild side, Tom reprising his role as the awkward but adorable hero (I do hope the kid is given range sometime soon) and Chris as the Star Lord, errr, Dungeon Master Barley.
But the plot holes in the story and concepts are too distracting. If magic was so difficult to master, how did a teenage elf master it in one night? In a place with pet dragons and wild unicorns, did everyone just lose interest in magic altogether? How do elf-centaur relationships work and why are there no more mixed-breed kids running around?
Disney’s lasting stories have always been about finding the magic around us – stories that stick with us because they show a side of our existing world that we wanted to live in. And at the end of the day, a magical world that has given up its magic because of light switches and then rediscovers it because of a pair of elf bros is simply not enchanting enough.
