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A Burkean Fable for Our Time
Pixar’s Onward and the Quest for Progress Through Tradition
Darkness fills the first frame of Pixar’s delightful new fantasy adventure film Onward. It’s a thematically appropriate choice given the information we receive from the voice-over narration that follows: magic once filled the world but has now fallen into obscurity. Once upon a time, the narrator continues, wizards and witches roamed about casting spells, questing after treasure and defending the weak against the predation of fantastic beasts. But those days of emprise are long gone. Existence now is a humdrum affair, civilization’s vitality enervated by the adoption of easy technology, abandonment of the magical old ways having left behind only a complacently decadent social order of ennui and rising anxiety.
Onward’s main character, Ian Lightfoot, a teenage elf drowning in excessive worry and lack of self-confidence, personifies this state of things. Poor Ian can’t even summon the composure to invite his classmates to his birthday party. It’s the same for almost everyone else in New Mushroomton, Ian’s hometown, too. A universal tedium settles over everything. Even the Manticore, a once ferocious magical creature famed for her courage and audacity, is diminished to a bumbling waitress in the former lair she has converted into an anodyne family-friendly restaurant. The…