"Forward" to the quest for elf insuranceExBulletin

In the early minutes of Disney / Pixar & # 39; s Forward, we encounter various manifestations of loss.

There is the set of the film, a world where magic once flourished, and with it, the elves, the unicorns, the pegasi, the elves, the ogres, the centaurs, the mermaids, your high fantasy mythical biome standard . But even here, in a gadget, the film looks sufficiently in juuuuuust, the industrial revolution has arrived. As automation increased, the magic faded. The elves still live in giant toads, but said toads are now rigidly distributed into large subdivisions and cul-de-sacs of Spielberg-suburbs. Formerly splendid unicorns have become wild, attacking raid trash cans and whistling at passers-by like particularly horse raccoons. If Middle-earth had more malls, it would look something like this.

There is also the loss suffered by the elf family at the center of the film: mom Laurel (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her two youngest sons, worried Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and her older brother, chamois and obsessed with Barley RPGs (Chris Pratt, back in Andy Dwyer mode). It’s Ian’s 16th birthday, and he received a gift from his late father, who died when Ian was too young to remember him: a sorcerer's staff.

Finally, in those first few minutes, there is yet another feeling of loss that manifests in the viewer than that of a lost opportunity.

The jokes are hairless and smarmy, the family dynamics painfully familiar, and as we follow Ian in high school, each encounter and interaction feels less Disney / Pixar and more Disney Channel, that is to say too sweet, too cornball , too affected, too false-contemporary. The average young child in the audience won't notice; the average parent will start checking out the theater.

But!

At the end of the 20 minutes or not by coincidence, upon the arrival of a manticore called Corey, voiced by Octavia Spencer, the film seems to discover what it is: a testimony to the remarkable degree of 39; emotional expressiveness that Pixar character animators can imbue. a story.

This is not to say that the voice cast is not solid. But so much of what drives Forward has to do with the body language of the characters, their facial expressions and their physical purity, albeit pixelated. In my projection, the scenes that produced the longest, strongest and deepest laughs of the audience, such as Corey's interactions with his doppelganger Chuck E. Cheese, or Ian's crossing of a yawning chasm landed as hard as they did because they were so fully imagined, wrapped up and executed, with comic timing as sure as it was visual. I am almost sure they would have worked without the sound.

As for the story, it is, rightly, a mythical quest / road movie: Ian, guided by a united Barley, must follow the clues on a map that will give him the tools he needs to bring their deceased father back for one. full day visit. (Ian managed to bring back his father's lower half in the first few minutes of the film and it's remarkable how much personality a pair of brown pants and a few Florsheims can convey.) This is where the hybrid nature of The film's suburb / fantasy is the most consistent, as when one of the biggest challenges Ian faces is not killing an animal, saving a young lady, or finding a treasure, but rather. .. to merge on a highway.

Pixar has been doing this whole story for quite some time now, so it's no surprise that the different lessons (read: spells) that Ian learns during the film fit perfectly at the peak of the film. . What East a surprise and a good one is how satisfying this climax turns out, especially since so many animated films are content to collapse into a noisy spectacle in their final minutes. (Note: Forwardthe highlight of Is count as a show, and East noisy but it has also been carefully designed to directly reflect the emotional issues that filmmakers have systematically raised during its lifetime.)

The film remains true to its Pixar provenance in its will not, it's pasty insistence to play on the emotions of viewers. That is to say: the last moments of the film are not just trying to pluck the strings, they saw the heart strings wildly, with a Gwar type abandonment. Prepare your children for this eventuality. And, discreetly, yourself.