A few days into shelter-in-place, I heard the news that we were getting a new Pixar movie. “Onward” had opened in theatres in early March, but its race to profit was kneecapped by the burgeoning coronavirus crisis. Two weeks after its theatrical début, Disney decided to release the film on streaming platforms, straight to a captive audience. As business decisions go, it looked almost like altruism: a new movie gave people like me—housebound parents of children young enough to be diverted by cartoons—something to look forward to.
And a Pixar movie at that! Most kids’ animation is pap: conventions and tropes punched up with smarmy double entendre for the benefit of the adults who bought the tickets. Pixar’s prestige entertainments are easily understood by little ones, but not so mindless as to exhaust the big people with them. Most contemporary family movies pander to adults, but in Pixar films, the references are rarely off-color—it’s fine if, say, the kids catch on that a character in “The Incredibles” is modelled on Edith Head. They’re also uncommonly lovely to look at—the undersea foliage of “Finding Nemo,” the afterlife cityscape of “Coco”—rewarding sustained attention and yielding to repeat viewing. Pixar’s finest movies are forthright yet somehow also respectful of childhood’s inherent innocence. The deservedly famous opening montage of “Up” tells the story of an entire life—its highs and lows, joys and losses—in about five minutes. Neither “Inside Out” nor the “Toy Story” series, particularly the gutting third installment, shy away from the terrible fact that children must grow up. Pixar makes kids happy and leaves adults in tears. When I took my sons to see the Day of the Dead fantasia “Coco,” there were many grownups in attendance unaccompanied by children.
While I’d never go to a family movie without children in tow, I still eagerly joined my sons for a living-room screening of “Onward”—yes, Disney, give me a laugh or a cry. I don’t need catharsis; I’ll accept any break from the routine of our days under quarantine. In “Onward,” elves, folkloric figures, and creatures from Greek mythology share a hodgepodge world in which magic has been supplanted by technology and suburbanization. Ian, a teen-age elf, learns that his late father left him the tools for a spell, one that can resurrect his dad for one day only. Ian’s first attempt brings back only the lower half of his father’s body, so he, his brother Barley, and their dad’s disembodied legs set out on a quest to finish the trick.
My children are thrilled by “Onward,” but my children, bless them, have terrible taste. They don’t notice the stock characters: the mother is both doting and embarrassing; the goofy big brother is the type you’d find in his mom’s basement playing Dungeons & Dragons all night. The kids don’t care about the tired deployment of trope, like the physically small person—a pixie in this instance—with an outsized tough attitude. They found the father’s disembodied legs amusing in a way I did not, and maybe it follows that they’d be moved watching a story about mourning one’s dad while sitting next to both of their dad.
I want to raise my kids to be critical consumers without wholly spoiling life’s mindless pleasures. The true disappointment of “Onward” is that its lazier turns demand this kind of parental interference. My sons are too young for me to explain my central quibble with the narrative: that its characters’ yearning for a simpler time when everyone did magic reminds me of the desire to Make America Great Again. I did, however, point out to them that the reduction of people of color to supporting roles is especially indefensible in an animated movie. Octavia Spencer plays the Manticore, who could be a heroic figure but is here mostly a sassy sidekick. More to the point, there’s no reason Spencer couldn’t have played Laurel, the boys’ mother.
That role went to one of our finest comic actors, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s performance feels pro forma, like she recorded it on her iPhone in her spare time. Laurel ultimately saves her sons’ lives, though she’s never given credit for it. In the film’s ponderous last moments, the camera lingers over family snapshots of the boys’ late father, finally panning to a picture of Laurel beaming proudly over her sons—but the camera moves downward to focus on the boys, effectively decapitating their mother. The credits roll. It’s a choice too specific to be accidental. My kids were aghast when I pointed out that the last flourish of “Onward,” a movie about children raised almost entirely by a single mother, is to cut off the mother’s head. They didn’t want critiques; they wanted only to watch a movie, to parachute out of our new, weird reality.
After these weeks of forced family togetherness, it’s hard to believe that my husband and I once found summer weekends interminable. On those very long Saturdays, we see a matinée to kill a couple of hours; in winter, we go to the theatre when it feels too cold to hit the playground. Embarrassing to admit, but my family will often see a movie twice, not because we love it but because there are only so many new releases.
What I find myself missing about theatregoing is what Richard Brody recently described as “the physical experience of the big screen and the dark room and the carved-out, shared block of time.” It’s an opportunity to check out as a parent, to cede some of the responsibility to Hollywood. Watching movies at home might engross the kids for a while, but they’ll still demand snacks or wander about in search of toys. In the theatre, the screen overwhelms, the dark soothes, the noise fills the space, and I cannot distract myself with the small screen of my phone. Like every parent at home right now, I bounce between dealing with my kids and staring at my phone. Going to the movies could alleviate both of those burdens.
Today’s movie theatres are almost too comfortable—certainly our go-to cinema is, with its deeply reclining seats. I’ve slept through “The Boss Baby” and I’ve slept through “Teen Titans GO! to the Movies.” I’ve dozed during “Bumblebee” and “Ferdinand” and the “Jumanji” reboot and “Storks” and “Aquaman.” Tickets and popcorn for four are no mean treat, but I’m an adult and don’t expect “The Secret Life of Pets 2” to captivate me. The price of admission is just the cost of a nap. Had I been able to sleep through most of “Onward,” I’d probably have succumbed to its few charms.
I relish taking the boys to the movies, though, and not only because I’m lazy. It’s our great good fortune to have a family life shaped by routine, and this is one of my favorites. Buying snacks, polling the kids about which of the coming attractions they’re excited about. (The answer is all of them, always.) Beyond supervising the occasional trip to the bathroom, I’m barely needed. There’s something lovely in that. The boys are ten and seven now, and the day when I’ll drop them at the theatre then kill a couple of hours reading at the Starbucks across the street seems inevitable. When we saw “Sonic the Hedgehog”—how I hope that is not the last film I ever see in a theatre—my older son ordered for us at the concession stand, paying for our food with my money, practicing for the day he’s able to do this all on his own.
Before the disruption of our school year, the three of us would take the subway to school in the morning, and my fifth grader would rehearse for commuting independently: exiting the train from a different door than his little brother and me, leaving the station from another exit. We’d all walk the same street, with me and little brother hand in hand on one side, big brother making his way alone on the other. I’d sometimes lose sight of him, his black puffy jacket disappearing into the streetscape, but then he’d linger on the opposite corner, waiting for the light to change, and I’d realize I’d been holding my breath for the moments I was unable to see him.
There’s no consistent logic to the universe of “Onward,” and nothing especially funny about how it depicts a dad as just a pair of legs, half-risen from the dead. The movie’s climax is cheap and cynical: the dad made whole again, for the briefest moment, which only his older son is able to experience. The movie wants you to cry—it’s what we’ve come to expect Pixar movies to do—and it doesn’t care what it needs to do in order to make that happen. But this is the state I already inhabit: perpetually close to tears, not of exalted emotion but confusion, frustration, despair. It’s the same state as anyone reading the news these days. It’s a small thing, but maybe we all miss the comforts of the old familial routines. Maybe I mourn our daily rehearsals for independence; perhaps selfishly, I just miss those naps.
“Onward,” as many better texts do, posits the journey from boyhood to manhood as a literal one. Two brothers head out into the world, their dad half-there, then gone altogether. The movie is not good, but it did strike a nerve. I’m not vanished yet, and, right now, the last thing I want is to send my kids into the future.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- How the coronavirus behaves inside a patient.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- The success of Hong Kong and Singapore in stemming the spread holds lessons for how to contain it in the United States.
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- With each new virus, we have scrambled for a new treatment. Can we prepare antivirals to combat the next global crisis?
- How pandemics have propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions, and redrawn maps.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
