Onward (2020)

“Onward” (2020), Disney-Pixar’s latest heart-string-tugging deep-dive into complex emotional issues was pretty averagely good.

The movie followed shy, socially-awkward Ian (Tom Holland), a teen elf who lived his whole life without ever meeting his father. Ian lived with his D&D loving older brother Barley (Chris Pratt) and generic every-mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who all just kind of lived from day to day. 
One of Ian’s few connections to his late father was a cassette tape recording with barely more than a minute of his father’s voice - a scene that was apparently quite close to the creator’s real-life childhood experience. 
The possibility of a magically-assisted chance to meet his dad for the first time drove Ian and Barley on an adventure with a 24-hour time limit. Long story short, Ian had the adventure of a lifetime and did a lot of growing up along the way. 
All things considered, it was a fairly color-by-numbers coming-of-age story, but the flair of setting it in a fantasy world made it more entertaining than had it been set in our world.

That said: the world-building was surprisingly shallow and often lacking. It was entertaining to see a mirror of our world where orcs and elves and imps and all manner of mythical beast lived in harmony, with unicorns filling in as wild pests. No humans were shown or mentioned at any point, which I’m fine with.
The key underpinning of this world was that the discovery of electricity - and the industrial revolution it led to - caused the downfall of magic usage and the extinction of the wizarding career field. The narrator said that electricity was easier to use because magic was “very hard to master.” 
Well, so is rocket science, but SpaceX is a growing company in a burgeoning market segment and I don’t see engineers giving up because car maintenance is easier.
Furthermore, in our world, you can find a hobby for anything, including my current money-sink of keyboard building. There are pages and forums and how-tos and stores to buy any piece of a keyboard I could possibly want to get my hands on, despite there being hundreds of keyboards factory-made and available to me with two day shipping.
And yet, somehow, in the magical world (which also had smartphones), there wasn’t a bright and vibrant wizard-hobbyist community. Every character treated actual magic with the same kind of reverence and fear we would use if someone could suddenly cast a magic spell here in our world.
I know. I get it: I’m not the target audience. Kids aren’t going to think about things like that.
But I am. 
Especially when the linchpin for the plot was a disease-caused death. Magic was shown to defy the laws of physics; while this magical world clearly relied on something parallel to the scientific method we know and love, it sure seems like the science-defying magic absolutely should have stayed in vogue too, to solve damn near any problem that science couldn’t.

There was also a character that could only have been hundreds - if not thousands - of years old, whom they treated as simply a peer of the era. While they did have knowledge useful to the quest at hand, it didn’t make sense that they’d fallen prey to modern problems.

Most disappointingly, the music was surprisingly bland: it was a movie set in a fantasy world. With decades of soundtracks from video games and movies alike in this genre, there’s no reason that the entire flick wasn’t scored with only the most epic of adventuring tunes. Heck, even something cheesy like you hear at Renaissance Fairs would have been appropriate. Instead, we were treated to some very generic rock music and one slightly uncomfortable ringtone. I understand why rock music: Barley was dressed in grunge and drove a mid-90s van with a graphic of a unicorn painted on the side. That doesn’t excuse the rest of the songs though.

And this was a Pixar animated feature, which means it was all CGI and thus looked just fine throughout.

This wasn’t a bad movie. It scored on par with “Frozen II” (2019), but got there for different reasons. Like every good Pixar movie, it told a tough lesson about life through a colorful, easy to understand story, but it didn’t deviate in any way to really stand out.
I don’t have a lot to say, because this movie didn’t have a lot worth talking about.
I am surprised at how few Easter egg references I saw, as this would have been ripe for anything from Narnia to Game of Thrones or Final Fantasy. I caught one LOTR reference, but that was it.

This was okay, but I can’t really recommend you see it in theaters. It’s going to look and sound just fine on whatever TV you have at home.