A pair of elves turn their dead dad into pants in Pixar’s Onward

It’s been a ban­ner year for ani­mat­ed fea­ture projects with deeply bizarre, inex­plic­a­ble premis­es. Ear­li­er this year, the trail­er for Spies in Dis­guise took every­one off guard with its Shya­malan-esque reveal that the espi­onage com­e­dy is actu­al­ly about a guy turn­ing into a pigeon.

Now along comes the first tease for Pixar-Disney’s newest release Onward, which seems like a kid-friend­ly riff on Matt Groening’s series Dis­en­chant­ment, like­wise imag­in­ing a fan­ta­sy world gov­erned by the same banal­i­ty of our mod­ern times. Except that the real action in this mag­i­cal­ly-ordi­nary uni­verse con­cerns a pair of elves rean­i­mat­ing the spir­it of their deceased father as a pair of sen­tient trousers.

The clip below walks us through the first act set­up, and from there, we’re off and run­ning: meek Ian and bois­ter­ous Bar­ley Light­foot (Tom Hol­land and Chris Pratt) dis­cov­er their late dad’s wiz­ard staff, and reck­less­ly decide to bring his depart­ed spir­it back to life. Except they foul up the spell and stop the regen­er­a­tion process right around the belt­line, send­ing the three of them on a wild adven­ture to acquire a tor­so through sci­ence or magic.

Their odyssey will take them through a world of won­der and broad com­e­dy, com­plete with fer­al uni­corns and Ye Olde 7‑Eleven Stand-In con­ve­nience stores. Oth­er voice tal­ent on board for this momen­tous jour­ney includes Julia Louis-Drey­fus (as the boys’ long-suf­fer­ing moth­er) and Octavia Spencer (as what­ev­er a Man­ra­core might be).

Maybe it’s the less-than-hyper­re­al­is­tic ani­ma­tion style, or the 3‑in-the-morn­ing-on-cup-eight-of-cof­fee vibe of the premise, but this feels out of joint with the recent Pixar orig­i­nals. It seems to exchange the guile­less sweet­heart nature of Coco for some­thing a lit­tle more smart-alecky, dare we say… Dream­Works-ish? Per­ish the thought.

Onward comes to the­aters in the UK and US on 6 March, 2020.