Movie reviewers tend, at least in private, to get ever-so-slightly blasé about the output of Pixar, Disney's computer animation arm. From Toy Story to A Bug's Life to The Incredibles to Ratatouille to, well, you get the idea, the stuff functions on such a high level of quality, from a certain perspective, it gets a little boring to write about. It's always so imaginative, so funny, so full of real heart, so visually and technologically innovative, one almost gets flummoxed. (Then there's the integrity thing—that hardly every Pixar picture functions as a pretext to create lots and lots of expensive ancillary merchandise.) One could almost hear a collective critical sigh of something like relief when Cars turned out to be just okay—albeit just okay on a very high level.
I'm almost reminded—and this is gonna sound weird, but bear with me—of a certain period in the career of the reliably dyspeptic post-punk band The Fall, whose run of albums from the early '80s to 1990 was so staggering that by, say, 1985's This Nation's Saving Grace, one ceased to be quite so staggered. "Ho-hum, another great Fall album," one would say. Which isn't to say one was ungrateful. Anyhow, not to go off on a tangent, as The Fall and Disney/Pixar really have little in common (although Fall frontman Mark E. Smith did pen a lyric entitled "Disney's Dream Debased," about [I think] an ill-fated trip to Disneyland, back before Pixar even existed). But still.
So it's not likely that I'm going to surprise anyone by saying that Up,directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, is terrific, but I will cop to that fact that the film—you'll excuse the phrase—had me at "hello," and for reasons that are largely extra-critical. As you probably know from the trailer, Up is about Carl, a grumpy old fellow who escapes from a worse-than-humdrum existence by making a flying ship out of his house, with the assistance of a shitload of helium balloons. His unwanted companion on the trek is an eager-beaver of a simulated Boy Scout named Nelson Russell, who only lacks an "Assisting the Elderly" badge to complete his vast array of such awards.
But the movie begins with Carl as anything but a grumpy old fellow; it depicts him as an adventure-obsessed (but shy) little boy who finds the ideal playmate, and eventually soulmate, in an equally adventure-obsessed (and not shy) little girl named Ellie. One of the most affecting scenes in the film, and one of the most brilliant things Pixar's ever done, is a wordless montage depicting the great ordinary love story of these two souls. And I have to admit it gave my heart more than a little tug that the adult Ellie—seen with Carl in the above still—reminded me an awful lot of My Lovely Wife. Who aside from being as smart and lively and beautiful as the cinematic Ellie, also has a similarly adventurous streak—while I was grilling basil, tomato, and mozzarella sausages this last weekend, she was off in Belize, snorkeling, cave-tubing, and zip-lining. (I would have joined her on the trip, which also included a wedding, save for a schedule conflict. But I sure as hell wouldn't have gone zip-lining.) Carl and Ellie's story ends sadly—hence Carl's grumpiness—but then, thanks to a wonderful reveal at the end of the movie, an end is shown as a potential new beginning, as Carl is reinvested with the couple's sense of adventure and...well, I don't want to reveal much more. But the moving stuff here is rich in sentiment as opposed to mere sentimentality, and it works like a charm.
As for the rest of the picture, well, I don't want to give away too much of that either, except to say that as Pixar stuff goes it's a lot more overtly cartoony than many of its prior features. Which, cartoon nut that I am, is cause to celebrate. Once Carl and Russell leave the U.S., they find a realm of high cliffs and funny animals, two staples of the genre. The sight of our duo and a couple of their guests being pursued by a pack of dogs whose alpha has an amusing glitch will no doubt remind fellow animation aficionados of the 1947 Looney Tunes gem, A Hare Grows In Manhattan, in which Bugs Bunny is chased by a similarly goofy group of canines. And the action set pieces have the same combination of creative lunacy and meticulous timing that distinguished the can-you-top-this? toy train sequence in Nick Park's latter-day Wallace and Gromit classic, The Wrong Trousers.
In short, great stuff. And nothing to be blasé about.
UPDATE: A reader in comments asked if I had seen the picture in 3-D. Yes, I had, and was pretty impressed. The technology is used in a pretty subtle and nuanced way, more in the planes-and-depth vein of Hitchcock's Dial "M" For Murder than like the comin'-at-ya! pyrotechnics of Zemeckis' Beowulf. Is it essential to see the film in that format? No, but I'd say it's desirable.
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