[Originally posted in August 2020 on Fantasy/Animation]

The most recent Pixar film, Onward (Dan Scanlon, 2020), tells the story of two brothers, Ian and Barley, who set out on a magical quest in a bid to spend one final day with their late father. On Ian’s sixteenth birthday he is presented with a gift left to him by his father, whom he has never met, with the instructions that he and his older brother could only open it when they were both at least sixteen. Onward is therefore a story strongly embedded in loss. Ian is a teenager, unsure of himself and anxious about transitioning into adulthood. Barley, on the other hand, is self-assured but finds solace in the mystical game Quests of Yore and his van, Guinevere. Released in early March 2020, Onward is the first time Pixar have created an explicitly magical realm as the backdrop for the main narrative (unlike previous releases, which have typically been set in a recognisably ‘real’ world but with magical or fantastical intrusions). The film’s primary location, New Mushroomton, is the home to several mythical creatures including elves, trolls, centaurs, dragons and unicorns. It is also a place where magic once existed, but has slowly fallen out of practice with the rise of modern technology. This dimension makes New Mushroomton an interesting parallel to real life societies and technocultures, as we are certainly living in a more connected and automated world. This shift by Pixar into more overtly magical and fantastical settings for its feature films could, in turn, be in response to recent trends in high fantasy stories, which are increasingly popular in mainstream media culture. Each series of Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011-2019), for example, gained more and more fans and followers, and it was estimated that 19.3 million people tuned in to watch the finale across HBO viewing platforms and 13.6 million tuning in to watch live on TV. If Pixar was going to attempt to create a fantastical world full of magic and dragons with Onward, then now seemed to be the perfect time. This blog post will argue that there is comfort in the way Pixar presents tragedy through their shift towards more directly fantastical elements. I will also explore the increasingly darker themes of Pixar productions, specifically their treatment of death, loss and grief, but will also discuss – despite their heightened levels of fantasy in films such as Onward – what it is that makes Pixar features indisputably human.

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