Sorry for the delay everyone. It’s been a very busy month for me
personally. With working more hours due
to being an essential employee as well as a major personal milestone in my life
officially on the books (WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!), I really haven’t gotten a chance
to write anything in a few weeks. Will
try to be more timely with these posts, but I can’t make any real promises on
that since we are in the process of the legal paperwork and getting the place
ready to be furnished since we move into it in a month. What happens happens, but I’ll try to get
some more entries written when I can.
Anyway…does anyone remember over a month ago when this came
out in theaters with a 40 million opening weekend?
And now movie theaters are closed for the
forseeable future as VOD streaming is about to become the new way for movie
studios to profit on our unfortunate circumstances. What a difference a month makes, right?
I could turn this entire post about COVID-19 and how this
pandemic is going to affect the forseeable future once the curve flattens. It’s very hard not to at this point in time
because that’s going to be the talking point for everyone for quite some time
even after its all said and done. But we’ve all had to learn to adapt to
it. Figure out what this new normal is
going to be for the forseeable future.
Every last one of us. Including
movie studios.
Here’s the thing about movies. For the past hundred or so years of movies
existing, studios have always utilized movie theaters as the go to for viewing
films. Eventually technology had to keep
advancing so movies did as well. With
that came ways to view movies from your home with video tapes on your
television and eventually DVDs and Blu-Ray.
It’s what we like to call first run.
And then streaming came along and changed that as well. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu
started to release original movies that you can view from the comfort of your
home. But now that we are stuck to the
comfort of our own homes, movie studios are learning that they have to adapt
with the times once more. Instead of
major studios releasing their films in theaters, some are starting to send them
straight to streaming.
So now I get the chance to view some of these movies I’ve
missed out on when they were in theaters or have to pay a small surcharge to
watch theatrical movies from the comfort of my own home. So kind of like paying for a movie ticket,
right? Studios are still going to make
revenue off movies. Just in a new
format. We’ll have to wait and see in a
couple years if this is the new normal when this pandemic is all said and done.
…okay now I promise no more pandemic talk in this review. What I’m getting at is that I missed Onward
while it was in theaters and now I finally caught it two months later thanks to
Disney sending it to Disney+ over a month after its theatrical release. So how was it?
Honestly, I was a tad disappointed. For being Pixar’s first original film in
years, I was admittedly expecting a lot more.
Because this is Pixar we are talking about. The most critically praised animation studio
of the last twenty years. The gold
standard when it comes to what other studios are aiming for with their
animation companies. And when the
trailers first came out for this, I thought
this premise had a lot more
potential than what we got from it.
That’s not to say this is bad mind you. Pixar has had only two bad movies for me in
its over twenty five years of partnership with Disney. That’s a pretty damn solid track record. And honestly, a lot of this movie does work. This is some of the best animation I’ve ever
seen in a Pixar movie. So many sequences
to me felt like they blurred the fine line between computer animation and
reality. I felt like I was living in
this world they were setting everything in.
It’s voice acting is top notch, with Chris Pratt and Octavia Spencer
being its two major standouts of the bunch.
And I absolutely bought into the emotional hook of a pair of brother who
grew up most of their lives with one parent.
Even though I didn’t really relate due to me being fortunate enough to still
have both parents in my life, I know plenty of people who grew up in this
scenario and I believe the movie did a good job conveying this as such.
To me, what doesn’t work nearly as well is this story. It’s as basic as it gets in terms of buddy
adventure comedies with medieval times characters and scenarios living in the
real world. I thought there would be a
tad more magic than that, pun intended.
But the magic didn’t translate nearly as well on screen as they probably
thought. If this was any other animation
studio, I feel like I would be a tad lighter on this issue, but this is Pixar
we are talking about. The same studios
that gave multiple dimensions to toys. They
made us care about a plastic fork come to life just last year. Heck in their last original movie years ago
Coco, they did an amazing job making the afterlife feel larger than life. How can they be this uninteresting with
medieval times in real life?
And speaking of this story without going into spoilers, the
ending left me wanting a lot more than what the payoff gave us. You spend all movie building up to this one
thing rooting for it to happen, and what we got was a swerve, but it didn’t
work nearly as well. I mean I get
exactly what it was going for and I didn’t hate it, but it was definitely a
problem for me because I really wanted to see this character get what he’s
wanted the entire movie. And while it
was addressed in some fashion, it wasn’t the payoff I was hoping for.
I think the real telling sign that this movie was only okay
in my books was that the emotional
moments where Pixar usually gets a few tears
didn’t get a single drop from me. It has
been since 2011 where that has happened for me personally from a Pixar
movie. Granted not every Pixar movie has
those moments. You won’t see me crying
during Jack-Jack vs The Raccoon from The Incredibles 2, which was a scene of
modern art. But this was a bit of a
misfire on my end if I couldn’t tear up once, yeah I’m sorry it didn’t connect.
Like I said before, I didn’t hate this. This review probably sounded a lot more negative
than it had any right to be because it was okay. But I hold Pixar to a much higher standard
than what I felt like we got from Onward.
Oh well, they can’t all be winners.
It’s worth watching once at least.
C+
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