Onward Review: 6 Ups & 4 Downs

2. The Excellent World-Building

Easily the most interesting thing about Onward is the world that Dan Scanlon has created - a peculiar yet compelling combination of fantasy tropes and real-life drudgery.

The movie kicks off by hastily explaining that magic has largely taken a backseat to the technological conveniences of the modern day, such that even those capable of grand supernatural feats tend to rely on the machinery you'd expect humans to use (namely cars).

But of course, Onward is concerned with its brother protagonists rediscovering magic, and so the fantastical and the mundane are amusingly intermingled.

Far more could certainly have been done to flesh this world out, but there's a sure charm to how cleverly two disparate aesthetics and civilisations are melded together.