Up
June 3, 2009
How wonderful a film that can astonish you with color, charm you with character, wow you with music, devastate you with loss, and span the inimitable 70 years of a life with few to no words, and accomplish all this in the first ten minutes of a 100 minute running time. But then again this is Pixar, who for ten films now has been creating stories and building character relationships that just happen to take place within state-of-the-art animation techniques, and if we ever begin to take the great studio and their endless string of masterpieces for granted, they come back at us with yet another tenderly sweet and funny adventure of pain, discovery, and soul; Marlin traversing the ocean for his lost Nemo, WALL-E and EVE desperately trying to get the last plant on Earth back to their space-ship to save a dead planet, Buzz and his toy friends trying to save Jessie and Woody from an antique toy dealer, Mr. Incredible's astonished defeat when he thinks his family has been murdered, and now Carl Fredricksen in “Up”, a cranky septuagenarian who loses his beloved Ellie to cancer and vows to take the trip to Venezuela they never quite got around to, the hitch, he attaches his house to thousands and thousands of helium balloons and flies it there. If the technical wizardry of the flying sequences owes a bit of gratitude to Miyazaki's “Castle in the Sky” it's probably intentional; Pixar worships at the drawing board of Miyazaki, and frankly, by now both Pixar and the Japanese master have earned their respective homages with honors.
What ensues, as Carl (Ed Asner) painfully reminisces about the happy years of his marriage, while trying to move on with the help of a talky kid stow-a-way, a pudgy ball of energy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) in a junior camper ranger outfit and equipped with an equally broken heart after his father has abandoned him and his mother, is a mesmerizing narrative that finds the two unlikely partners flying the house fantastic to beautiful Paradise Falls, where they meet a rare bird named Kevin, a hilarious talking dog named Dug (he'd have a good time with the hyper hamster from “Bolt”), and a nemesis in the evil aviation pioneer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who doesn't go in for Carl and Russell's innocent story. Director Pete Docter, a founding Pixar member and director of the eternally sweet “Monsters Inc.”, has tremendous compassion for these characters – even Muntz, the crotchety villain, has motives buried in unnecessary humiliation at the hands of a scrupulous media - balancing heart-breaking emotion (the opener is a three hankie weeper, the finale a joyous, equally moving triumph), with wondrous jungle-scapes, eye popping color, and sweeping sounds (Michael Giacchino – the mastermind behind “Lost”, “Fringe”, and the Oscar nominated “Ratatouille” scores – lends an important hand in guiding the thrills and penetrating emotions) that rivals Pixar's best.
For a studio that has so many “bests”, to keep hitting emotionally satisfying grand slams like “WALL-E” and “Up” on a year-to-year basis is a remarkable feat, one that we can only pray will continue long into the future.
By Adam Suraf