Review: Up Written By Brian Paterson on 6.07.09
Up isn’t just the title of Pixar’s latest full-length offering, it’s also indicative of their meteoric rise to the summit of the animation world. Under the admiralty of Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter, Pixar has routinely distanced themselves from the “children first” mantra at Disney to instead aspire for something greater. Stories as simple as a childhood toy being replaced and a Clown Fish getting separated from his father have evolved to cautionary tales of an uninhabitable earth and one man’s coping with the death of his lifelong sweetheart. Pixar’s reinvigoration of genre over the past thirteen years has prompted a second Golden Age of Animation, and only they can dictate when exactly it will end.
Our presentation begins with a superb little animated short entitled Partly Cloudy, a brilliant retelling of the classic “baby and the stork” fable. I’ll steer clear of specifics regarding story, but expect your friends and families’ cuteness meters to be shattering after only a few moments. Also, do yourselves a huge favor and shell out the extra Lincoln for the 3-D shades; Cloudy contains some of the most gorgeous CGI yet, but seeing it burst off the screen in lavish color multiplies its beauty tenfold.
In typical Pixar fashion, our feature film opens not with the character we had been visually assaulted with on television and billboard advertisements for months, but something completely unexpected: a vintage-Americana newsreel of a disgraced explorer by the name of Charles Muntz. As the camera pulls out of the black and white footage, we finally meet our hero, albeit seventy years younger. Clad in a leather flight helmet and goggles that would make Charles Lindbergh proud, a young Carl Fredrickson roams the town in search of adventure - and he finds just that in Ellie, a firecracker of a redhead who invites Carl to her secret club. When she discloses her grand plans to fly away to Paradise Falls, she forces Carl to promise that he will accompany her on the trip. Lovestruck, we hear the young boy utter one of only two words from the opening segment: “Wow.”
The subsequent montage, accompanied by another masterful score from composer Michael Giacchino, stands amongst film’s greatest, and most poignant, I’ve seen. In arguably the most important scene in the film, Director Peter Doctor deftly balances the highs and lows of our main character’s life with ease, never sacrificing drama for the sake of a younger audience. The children in the front row may not have understood the significance of Carl sitting alone in a dimly lit church, but it speaks volumes about the risks Up’s writers and directors are willing to make in order to properly tell the story. The Ellie we see in this short montage, from early adulthood to her elder years, could not be done justice by a simple mention later in the story.
Like Wall-E before him, Carl decides to break the monotony of everyday life by taking a chance. When confronted by the state for protecting one of the sacred artifacts of he and Ellie’s life, Carl ties thousands of balloons to his chimney and takes to the skies. After setting a course for South America and taking a well-earned moment of relaxation in his favorite chair, Carl discovers that he isn’t the only adventurer aboard. Russell, a Wilderness Explorer voiced wonderfully by Jordan Nagai, is the primary cog Pixar conveniently hurls into Carl’s plans. Russell proves a remarkable character not because of any great joke or complexity, but because, upon reflection, he realizes “the boring stuff” is that which we remember most - something that took Carl seventy-eight years to fully realize. Throw in a hilarious talking canine and a bird with the flexibility of Gumby and you’ve got yourself a crew only the folks at Pixar can meld together.
Simply put, Up is a phenomenal film, and it comes as no surprise that it currently stands as the crown jewel of the Pixar collection. Its intricate blend of humor (without aid of pop culture), genuinely heartfelt moments, and for lack of a better word, humanness of it all have helped create a fine piece of American film, one that will be shown to my children ad-nauseam, and hopefully in turn to theirs.
