Nice movie, not great, had some problems (SPOILERS!)

Just finished watching 'Onward'. A few thoughts:

It was a nice movie, occasionally funny, very pretty to look at. The two main characters are appealing. The story itself is a bit shallow and would have benefitted from a little more development.

Is Barley the only elf playing that D&D game? Is he the only one committed to keeping magic alive? Why? I felt like we should have seen a small group of fellow D&D buddies who believed in magic too, just so it didn't feel so much like he was just living a fantasy in his head without support.

The entire concept of "There was magic in the world until someone figured out it was easier to rely on 'modern' things like electricity and cell phones" is an interesting one, but in the movie it's shown as "Magic one day - No magic the next" and I would think that since magic is so powerful, there would have had to be a way that it could survive even in a modern world, much the same way we have electricity and the internet, but also Christianity and Spiritualism. The idea that pixies would FORGET they can fly, and centaurs would drive cars and never run like horses, seems a bit of a stretch.

I also missed the whole point of the search for the phoenix gem. The characters gained nothing by going to the Inn, following the ravens pointing, going down the river, etc. because they ended up at the high school anyway, right back where they started. Yeah, there were a lot of cute character moments but neither Ian nor Barley were changed at all at the end of the quest - they were essentially the same characters. Same for their mom. The only change was the Ian realized that everything he missed about having a dad he had in his older brother - but half his memories were things that happened when they were kids. He could have made that realization in his own back yard at the beginning of the movie.

Actually, there's nothing in Ian's character at the beginning of the movie to suggest he DOESN'T already see Barley as 'dad'. They have a great non-competitive relationship and seem to get along just fine. Aside from him saying 'Gee, I wish I'd met Dad', I didn't see anything missing in Ian's life that meeting his father would have filled. He doesn't seem to have any real deep yearning at all - it's more like a superficial "Gosh, I wish I had a sports car" kind of thing, and we only know he's got it because he says so. There's more telling and less showing in this movie.

Barley's character comes across as more poignant, but again it comes across as a little off-kilter. We find out that his reckless fearlessness comes from being sad about being too scared to go in to say goodbye to his dad in the hospital because Dad had a bunch of tubes and machines around him. That's sad, but also made me wonder why his mom didn't go in with him/prepare him for that - it would be scary for any kid. It seemed to me like their mom did a poor job of preparing little Barley for something that was obviously distressing, but Barley grew up thinking HE was the failure for not just marching into a situation that's tough for a lot of adults to handle. So that didn't quite ring true for me either.

It also made me wonder, since this is a world of magic, are there no wizards/spell books/anything left that can cure illness? There doesn't seem to be, and that struck me as odd. D&D has lots of healing spells etc. but this world which seems based on D&D doesn't? I was waiting for Barley to admit that the reason he was so obsessed with magic was that he felt helpless watching his dad die and was looking for some source of absolute strength - in other words, to find reassurance that there was a spell, or a gem, or something that could heal the sick and bring the dead back to life (which exists in D&D).

The movie didn't go there, though, except for the staff and the "Here's a resurrection spell that wears off in 24 hours" trope - which Barley seems weirdly unaware off despite his encyclopedic knowledge of every spell and incantation in existence. You'd think he'd have memorized a resurrection spell when he was a toddler.

To me Barley turning to D&D to resolve his own feelings of helplessness would have been more poignant than him thinking he was weak for being scared of hospitals when he was a little kid and being obsessed with magic for no apparent reason. Because hospitals ARE scary, and him blaming himself makes me not like the mother for letting him carry that burden.

The movie is visually gorgeous, as all Pixar movies are, but there was only 'gag' that stood out to me, and that was when the manticore stung the pawn shop owner to grab the sword. I also liked the pixies being a motorcycle gang of badass jerks, but that gag kind of didn't go much of anywhere.

So, overall: enjoyable, had problems, good voice cast, but "Coco" it ain't.