Onward

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Ian Lightfoot’s sixteenth birthday brings a gift left by his late father: a staff, a gem and a spell allowing a day’s return. The spell restores only Wilden’s lower half before the gem breaks. Ian and his older brother Barley seek another gem, following clues through a world that has largely replaced magic with technology. Their journey leads back to Ian’s school, where Barley finds the gem and triggers a dragon-like curse. Ian realises that many experiences he wanted with his father were already given to him by his brother. He holds off the creature so Barley can have the goodbye he once missed, seeing his father only from a distance. The brothers return to life with renewed confidence and closeness. The quest’s meaning changes without dismissing the loss that began it.

The setting’s charm comes from allowing fantasy to become ordinary. An elf can have the same anxieties as a suburban teenager, while a creature associated with heroic stories can inhabit a thoroughly practical modern role. That combination gives the world more personality than a simple collection of magical beings. Its residents have adapted to convenience, and the traces of wonder remain inside routines that no longer require anyone to think of them as wonderful. The film’s adventure therefore involves a change in attention as well as a change of location. Something apparently outdated can become useful again when a person recognises knowledge that everyday life has stopped rewarding.

Ian’s uncertainty is specific to a young person who measures himself against an imagined version of someone he never had the chance to know. Absence can produce an ideal with no ordinary imperfections, making it difficult for the living people nearby to appear equally important. Tom Holland’s voice gives Ian a hesitancy that keeps the emotional task close to the practical one. Confidence is not an abstract virtue handed to him at the beginning. It has to develop through an encounter with difficulty, with the possibility of being wrong and with the uncomfortable recognition that another person’s strengths may not resemble the kind of strength he expected to admire.

Chris Pratt’s Barley brings noisy conviction into the same relationship. His enthusiasm can look excessive from Ian’s perspective, but the performance allows excitement to contain both knowledge and vulnerability. Being the older sibling does not mean having every part of life settled. The contrast makes the brothers more interesting than a neat pairing of the sensible one and the foolish one. Each can misread what the other needs, and each can possess something the other has undervalued. Their shared journey has emotional force because affection does not prevent irritation. The film gives room to the ordinary friction of family before asking the audience to recognise the care that persists beneath it.

The world’s comic details make its central idea tangible. Unicorns rummage through rubbish, a pet dragon behaves with domestic familiarity, and Barley’s decorated van takes the place of a heroic mount. Those images make a society feel as though it has a history, with formerly extraordinary creatures folded into ordinary surroundings. Their humour does not require a lecture about how the change occurred. A single recognisable behaviour can show the distance between a grand cultural image and a practical present. The same principle gives the adventure its warmth: the fantasy setting remains strange enough to invite curiosity, but familiar enough for its family relationships to feel immediate.

Magic also gives the film a physical way of expressing trust. A spell is something that must be attempted, so uncertainty can become visible through posture, movement and the space between characters. The bridge sequence is especially useful in that respect, placing confidence against an environment that makes doubt understandable. What sounds easy as advice becomes difficult when a body has to act on it. Animation allows the world to enlarge that pressure while keeping the emotional question simple. The spectacle grows from a practical demand, and the viewer can follow why an act of belief might feel frightening rather than merely celebrate belief as an uncomplicated solution.

The partial return of Wilden creates comedy without making his absence trivial. A missing upper body turns a desired reunion into a practical problem that cannot offer the conversation the brothers hoped for. That unusual image gives longing a shape, keeping the emotional incompleteness present inside the journey. The father can accompany the adventure without becoming fully available to explain or resolve it. This leaves the brothers responsible for discovering what the encounter means. The film’s restraint matters: a story about loss does not have to provide complete restoration in order to offer recognition, and a magical possibility can expose what ordinary relationships have already supplied.

Dan Scanlon’s film uses a screenplay by Scanlon, Jason Headley and Keith Bunin to give a quest a destination more intimate than its magical objective. Ian’s growing ability matters, but the larger change concerns whom he sees and how he understands the life he has been living. The ending lets one form of closure belong to Barley while Ian finds meaning in a relationship still available to him. That distribution avoids making grief a contest with only one satisfying answer. Onward’s family world remains playful and visually expansive, yet its emotional centre is close at hand: noticing care can change the meaning of a journey without requiring the journey to recover everything that has been lost.