Tear Jerker

The Heartbreaking True Story Behind Pixar’s Onward

A lost father. A found tape. A voice a filmmaker thought he would never hear.
Onward Disney Pixar
Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

Dan Scanlon didn’t have a sad childhood; he just grew up with a hole in it.

It was in the shape of his father, who died in 1977 when Scanlon was only one year old. Neither he nor his brother, who is about three years older, remember their dad. They tried to construct some sense of him from pictures, from stories, from glimpses of the few soundless reel-to-reel home movies they had.

That’s what inspired Scanlon, a veteran Pixar creative team member and director of Monsters University, to pitch the idea for Onward, an animated fantasy about two brothers who do the same. These siblings—younger, shy Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and older, boisterous Barley (Chris Pratt)—are blue-skinned, pointy-eared elves in a suburban sword-and-sorcery world who harness magic to bring their late father back for one single day together.

They bungle the first try and end up only with their dad’s non-speaking bottom half — a pair of legs in khaki trousers with a glowing core where the rest of him should be. Their quest in the film, out Friday, is to collect the elements that will complete the spell before sundown the next day. After that, their dad will be gone forever.

Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

“When I was trying to come up with an idea for a film, you look to the sad things, you look towards your fears, because that’s where drama comes from,” Scanlon told Vanity Fair. “You look for the fun too. And I was talking to my mom on the phone and I said, ‘The truth is, I don’t know what to make a movie about, because nothing sad ever really happened to me.’”

“‘You lost your father,’” his mother replied.

“And I said, ‘Yeah, but that’s not sad, because I don’t remember him,’” Scanlon recalled. “And she said, ‘That’s why it’s sad.’”

In the video above, Scanlon shares the true story of one piece of real magic he and his brother uncovered that brought their father back to them, if only briefly: It came in the form of a forgotten cassette tape.

Many families have these floating around. Before everyone carried functioning studios in our back pockets, people in decades of yore would gather around someone’s tape recorder and take turns saying silly things into the mic, marveling at the strange sound of their own voices.

Within one such family recording, they heard their father’s voice for the first time, saying only two words, “hi” and an abbreviated “bye.” “In some ways, I think, what more do you need?” the director said. “I mean, if you’re only going to get two words, it’s nice to have those two.”

Ian and Barley have a tape of their father speaking as well; the pictures of their smiling, bearded dad also bear a resemblance to the late William Scanlon III. “He was a chemist and worked in the Detroit area for the auto industry,” Dan Scanlon said. “From what I know, he was a kind of scientific-minded guy, funny, but certainly a very logic-oriented person, which is maybe a little bit more like my brother, who is a computer programmer. Yeah, that’s some of what I know about him.”

Barley diverged significantly from Scanlon’s real brother, who is a lot more responsible than his metalhead, ne’er-do-well animated alter ego. “It’s funny. My brother and I get along so well that no one believed it when I tried to make the movie,” Scanlon said. “There was no drama in the movie, because we were just best friends, and people said, ‘Nobody’s brother is like that.’ And I said, ‘Mine is.’”

So Barley became more of a wild man, a well-meaning but chaotic presence. “Ian and Barley are vastly different, and even though Barley is a bit of a screw-up in Ian’s eyes, Ian would never admit that to him, and that’s what the journey really forces him to have to do,” the filmmaker said.

One thing Barley and Scanlon’s real brother both share is a twinge of guilt over not remembering their dad, even though they had several years with him. “It’s sad, especially for my brother,” the director said. “A three-year-old can truly know a parent in the moment, but my brother has no memories of him. He has two foggy ones that he’s not even sure are real.”

Courtesy of Disney/Pixar.

Onward is about recognizing what you have before it is gone, not just mourning what you’ve lost. Scanlon credits his mother (whose elfin equivalent is voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) for teaching him to be strong and appreciative, rather than letting grief define their family. “She did it wonderfully. I mean, she felt her feelings, which I’m very proud of her for, but she obviously had to put on a brave face and raised us wonderfully,” he said. “We didn’t miss a beat. We didn’t miss anything for having only one parent. We had a wonderful childhood, but she also never sugar-coated it. We always knew he had died, you know what I mean? It was a fact.”

But still, there was a void even after all these years—and making the Pixar film helped him fill in the space of the father he never knew. Scanlon prefers not to talk about the circumstances of his death; the painful parts are harder to share. It’s the joyful things he discovered while creating Onward that feel more important now.

“I haven’t really talked too much about this, but when Ian, in the movie, says, ‘Hi, Dad’ for the first time, it was really important to me that that be a strange thing for him to say. I’ve never called anyone ‘Dad.’ Or at least that’s what I thought,” Scanlon said. “I was telling the animators that, and the actors, and the writers, that this should be strange for him to say, because it would be strange for me to say.

“And then I told my mom that, and she said, ‘Oh, no, one of your first words was, ‘Dad.’ You called him, ‘Dad.’”

For so long, Scanlon just wanted to hear his father’s voice. Now he knows his father heard his too.

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