Pixar’s Onward Served as a Very Emotional Experience for Director Dan Scanlon
Courtesy of movieweb.com:
Onward, the upcoming fantasy adventure movie from Pixar, looks to be the kind of magical experience we have come to expect from the studio that gave us such animation classics as Toy Story and Inside Out. With Chris Pratt recently revealing that a screening of the movie left grown men in tears, Onward sounds like it will be an emotional journey for all involved, and certainly was for director Dan Scanlon.
“I think we have an amazing opportunity to talk to a lot of the world and have a voice that would get heard. So it’s an incredible responsibility I think to use it well. This is a story and a subject matter and a sort of human situation that I believe in a lot and that I’m so lucky to have experienced.
And already just telling it to people on the crew as they joined, they had stuff under a similar theme that they felt in their family life. It didn’t have to do with brothers necessarily or fathers, but it was the basic theme of the movie. And so to be able to put that out in the world is a complete joy.”
It certainly sounds like making Onward was very personal to Dan Scanlon, and with such universal themes as brotherhood and bereavement, it is easy to see why.
“It’s just an incredible honor to get to do my specific take on it. Also in this gigantic, hilarious, weird like huge movie and you know, it’s a very intimate story, but a blockbuster, crazy big movie, which I think is part of the fun of it and what makes it just feel very, very real and hopefully sneaks up on you a little bit. Hopefully you’re laughing more than crying, but hopefully you’re crying a lot at the end!”
This being a Pixar movie, crying is to be expected. Scanlon also discussed the title of the movie, and how difficult a process it actually was to come up with one that did not sound too silly or serious.
“It was a hard film to title to be honest. We spent a long time trying to figure it out because we could have gone the route of like Half Dead or their world is so crazy silly. Like, so there were a whole bunch of silly things, but we wanted it to be serious or not serious, but we wanted it to really represent what the themes in the film were. And we wanted it to be positive.
So Onward, it’s a journey film, so it’s kind of has that element to it. And it’s also a coming of age story. And so it’s kind of like things that happen that you want to kind of put behind you and move forward and how do you move forward in life? So kind of encapsulated a whole bunch of those ideas.”
Onward follows two teenage elf brothers, Ian and Barley Lightfoot, who go on an journey to discover if there is still a little magic left out there in the world in order to spend one last day with their father, who died when they were too young to remember him. The movie is scheduled to be released on March 6, 2020. This comes to us from ComicBook.com.
