“Onward” springs from a deeply personal place and nestles on a heartbreaking premise: the possibility of being able to spend just one more day with a parent who has passed away.

But the high-energy, pop-culture-heavy result feels frantically eager to please, until it tries to yank at your heartstrings in the by-now familiar formula of Pixar Animation. (And of course, the idea of a deceased parent as a crucial plot point is practically on page one of the Disney playbook. My 10-year-old son even commented on this while walking back to the car after a Saturday morning screening.) The film is episodic in structure, leaping from one place to get one thing before leaping to another place to get another, and so on and so on in a series of breathless fetch quests. But in the few moments when it settles down and allows its characters to interact with one another in a meaningful way, “Onward” provides a glimpse of what director and co-writer Dan Scanlon probably was aiming for in sharing an intimate piece of his childhood on the big screen.