Movie: Onward

Last night my husband and I watched Onward, by Disney Pixar. We didn't have super high expectations, since we are both pretty sensitive people, and often we are surprised by the amount of crude jokes or language in an animated "family" movie.

But we were so, so pleasantly surprised with this movie!!! We both really enjoyed it and the positive messages in it!

Since our kids are really young (toddler-age young), we didn't watch this with them. And I feel that was a good choice for our first time watching it. There are some scenes that could have been surprising or frightening for them. Including the fact that a huge part of the storyline is a spell gone wrong, leaving a character torso-less (he's literally just shoes and a pair of pants)!

Things I loved about the movie:
-Great animation
-Very clean
-Adventure
-Positive messages about families, finding yourself, courage in challenging times, acknowledging emotions, loss, and grief, and treasuring relationships
-The creativity!!! (Mystical creatures, magic, beautiful scenery!)
-Humor that was clean and positive and made us laugh out loud
-I already mentioned the positive messages about families and relationships, but I really appreciated the mother and father characters, as well as the relationship between brothers. The relationships were really supportive, loving, and real! (I LOVED the mom!!!)

I'd definitely recommend this movie! It's the best animated movie I've seen in quite a while! It seems to me the PG rating was more for action and adventure than for sexual or crude content.

A great resource that our family loves is commonsensemedia.org. This is a free website where you can look up movies and books to see what parents and kids rate movies based on content and appropriateness. They give their ideal age-rating for the movie, and provide details about different kinds of content you may be wondering about (language, drugs, sexual content, commercialism, positive messages, etc).

Common Sense Media rated Onward as being for 7 years or older. I agree with their rating, but of course think it depends on the individual child and their level of sensitivity to certain things.

In summary, I loved this movie and think you should check it out! The messages were so positive and it was a very uplifting movie!