10 Best Times A Movie Character Returned From The Dead
These characters were just too good to stay dead.
As the old saying goes, never trust an off-screen death.
If you can't explicitly see that a character has been killed, then chances are they actually haven't and will turn up alive and well at some point down the line. However, witnessing a death first-hand isn't even enough to make sure a character has permanently perished.
Films love to bring people back from the dead, usually through some convoluted magic ritual. Sometimes, this doesn't work at all, and is just a lazy way for writers to get around accidentally bumping a character off too soon.
In other cases though, it is utter perfection.
First of all, let's clear up what we mean by "dead".
Quite simply, we mean when a character's life has ended. When they have shuffled off this mortal coil. When they have gone to join the big party in the sky, and all the other Monty Python lines.
We are not accepting characters who were presumed dead or who were nearly dead but survived. If their heart is still beating even just a little bit, then we're not interested.
With that out of the way, let's dive in.
10. Wilden Lightfoot - Onward
An often-overlooked entry into the Pixar canon, Onward premiered in 2020 and starred huge names like Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Anyone who didn't see this movie when it first came out - which was a lot of people, because Onward was released right before the pandemic shut theatres - missed out on a sweet story about two teenage boys attempting to reconnect with their dead dad.
After a spell only brings back half of their father Wilden (the bottom half, to be precise), Ian (Holland) and Barley (Pratt) Lightfoot go on a quest to complete the resurrection before it wears off in 24 hours.
The surrealism of a man's legs wandering around willy-nilly means that this film is also very funny. However, at its core, it's highly emotionally charged as the Lightfoot brothers never really knew their father when he was alive.
A touching story about grief and how to cope with it, Onward is well worth a look if you didn't catch it the first time around.
Also, it'll be good for you to see Chris Pratt in a decent voice role before he ruins Mario in 2023.