The Psychology of Onward: Grieving a Father Never Known and the Brother Who Carries Him Forward

Grief for Someone Never Known

One of the most quietly substantive aspects of the film is its serious engagement with Ian's form of grief. Ian has never met his father and has no personal memories of him. He has photographs, stories, a cassette tape of his father's voice, and the specific absence his father's death has produced in his family and in his own development. Popular understanding often treats grief as primarily applicable to losses of people one knew directly, and the grief of children for parents who died before they could remember them, or before they were born, has been less culturally recognized as legitimate. The film's insistence that Ian's grief is real, that his longing for a father he has never known carries its own weight, is one of its more valuable contributions.

The Constructed Father

Research on what is sometimes called absent-parent or constructed-parent grief has documented specific features of this experience. The child who never knew the deceased parent typically builds their image of the parent from available materials: photographs, stories from surviving family members, possessions, and the shape of the absence they perceive in their family. The constructed parent is partly accurate and partly imagined, and the child often develops a real emotional relationship with this figure even though it is not, in any direct sense, the actual parent who existed. The grief is not for the parent the child knew. It is for the parent the child has constructed and the relationship with that parent the child has imagined but cannot have. Ian's short list of things he wanted to do with his father, to play catch, to have a heart-to-heart, to walk with him, captures this exactly: each item is small, and each is impossibly heavy, because the ordinary shared activities represent the whole relationship that was never possible.

Barley and the Burden of the Older Sibling

On the surface Barley is an exuberant, somewhat disheveled, role-playing-game-obsessed young man whose enthusiasm for magic and quests makes him, from Ian's perspective, a slightly embarrassing older brother. The film's late revelation, which reshapes everything that has come before, is that Barley has been, across Ian's entire life, the primary holder of their father. Most of what Ian knows about their father has come through Barley's stories rather than through direct contact with anyone who remembered the father firsthand. Barley has been performing the role of living archive for a family member who is no longer available. Research on the roles siblings play after significant loss documents this pattern: the older sibling old enough to have memories of the deceased parent often takes on the responsibility of maintaining the parent's presence in the family's ongoing life, telling the stories and preserving the details. The work is rarely recognized as work. It is also, genuinely, a form of labor that shapes the sibling performing it, and it costs Barley things he has not fully acknowledged.

The Mother Who Has Been Holding Everything

The brothers' mother Laurel is one of the film's more substantive secondary characters. She has been raising both sons since her husband's death, managing the household, the finances, the emotional lives of her children, and her own ongoing grief, while maintaining a new relationship with a centaur named Colt Bronco. Research on surviving parents in bereaved families consistently documents the difficulties of single parenting after a spouse's death: the parent grieves their partner while sustaining the household that partner helped support, attempts to provide emotional presence for children whose grief they are not fully equipped to address because their own remains unresolved, and is often financially stressed and emotionally depleted. Laurel's strategy of maintaining composure for her children while carrying her own unprocessed material is recognizable in many surviving parents. The film does not suggest she should have remained single indefinitely in mourning, but it takes the boys' feelings about the new partner seriously. The recognition it asks for is modest: that their mother's continued life, including her romantic life, is legitimate and does not betray the father they have been grieving.

The Specific Function of the Quest

The quest structure, in which the brothers travel across their world to find a magical gem that will complete the spell, has been criticized as fantasy contrivance, but this misses what it accomplishes psychologically. Requiring the brothers to work together under pressure, to face challenges, and to rely on each other produces experiences they could not otherwise have had. Each challenge becomes an occasion for Barley to teach Ian things their father would have taught him, and for Ian to demonstrate capacities his brother has been too close to see. Bereaved families often benefit from sustained shared effort that provides a container in which grief work can happen without requiring explicit verbal processing. Ian begins the film unable to perform the magical spells his father's letter has bequeathed to him because he is too anxious and too doubtful, and across the quest he develops the focus the spells demand through practice and through Barley's patient teaching. The development is not, primarily, magical. It is the kind of growth that quests have traditionally served to produce in young people.

The Revelation at the Film's End

The final sequence contains one of the most psychologically substantive revelations in recent animated cinema. The spell is about to expire, their father's upper body has briefly been restored, and Ian, who has waited his entire life to meet his father, has only seconds. Barley has been the one traveling with the incomplete form of their father throughout the quest, while Ian, focused on reaching him, has not actually spent time with him. In the final twist, Ian realizes the relationship he has been pursuing his whole life is not the one he most needs. He gives Barley the chance to say goodbye to their father, and Barley, who has carried the weight of their father's memory for years, gets the reconciliation he has been needing. Ian watches from a distance, choosing his brother's need over his own longing. The film's argument is mature: the fantasy of meeting his father cannot provide what actual fathering provides, and the relationship that has been making Ian who he is has been the one with Barley.

The Brothers Who Raised Each Other

The pattern the film engages with, in which older siblings perform significant parenting functions for younger siblings after a parent's death, is one of the most common but least discussed features of bereaved families. Research on what is sometimes called the parentified older sibling documents specific long-term effects: the older sibling often develops unusual maturity, strong caretaking capacities, and skill in managing complex situations, alongside difficulties with their own help-seeking, a sense that their needs matter less than others', and difficulty with dependent relationships in adulthood. They have been, from young ages, in positions of providing care rather than receiving it. Barley's eccentricities, his attachment to quests, his loyalty, and his ability to sustain enthusiasm his peers have outgrown can all be read as the shape of a role his family has required since his father's death. The film's recognition of Barley's importance is also a recognition of work he has been doing without it being named, a small corrective to a broader cultural pattern that has typically ignored this form of family labor.

The Magic That Is Memory

The film's setting, a suburban fantasy world in which magic once existed but has been largely forgotten in favor of modern convenience, functions as a metaphor that deserves attention. Many bereaved families, particularly those whose losses occurred where grief was not openly discussed, have had specific experiences and capacities of their deceased family members fade from family memory over time. The stories stop being told and the specific ways the deceased did things slip from daily consciousness. This fading is not necessarily wrong and can be part of adaptation, but it can leave younger family members with less access to the deceased than they might have wanted. The quest to recover lost magical capacities, which turns out to be a quest to recover aspects of the father's presence, mirrors work bereaved families sometimes undertake later in the process: gathering materials, recovering stories, consulting relatives who knew the deceased, and piecing together a fuller picture than everyday life had maintained. The recovery reconnects the family with parts of their loved one that daily life had required them to set aside.

Reflections for the Viewer

Onward has resonated particularly with viewers who lost a parent before being able to form direct memories of them, offering recognition of a grief experience popular culture has rarely engaged carefully. The grief for a parent one has never known is real, and so is the longing for the relationship that was never possible. For viewers who are older siblings in families that experienced significant loss, the film may offer a different recognition: the work you have been doing, often without it being named, is real, it has shaped both your siblings' development and your own, and it has both value and costs that deserve acknowledgment, including possibly within therapy. For parents in families that have experienced loss, the film is a gentle invitation to consider what surviving children may be carrying that has not been fully recognized, attending to these dynamics with curiosity rather than anxiety. Integration is slow and continues across years. In the end, Onward's final gift is the recognition that this integration is available, that it does not require the impossible reunion the brothers had been seeking, and that the relationships between surviving family members often contain more of what was lost than they have been credited with containing.

If this theme resonates, you may also find it useful to read about how to teach emotional regulation and building confidence in children, both of which touch on supporting a child through big feelings and self-worth.

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