Apparently there is more than one way to make a movie about a cranky, recently widowed old white man pestered by a bright-eyed Asian kid lingering on his porch. Who knew? No disrespect to Clint Eastwood, who should try working with a few thousand animated balloons just for the hell of it sometime, but Up is pretty much the anti-Gran Torino. In that regard and just in general, it works, buoyantly.
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Ever seen a house fly? Dug, Russell and Carl (from left) take a home off the market (and the earth) in Disney-Pixar’s Up. |
Disney-Pixar’s solitary geezer character is not a wiry war-hardened jingoist but a stout, shy guy who dreamed of airborne adventure as a boy, and shared an earthbound life with his soulmate instead. As kids, Carl (voiced by Jeremy Leary) and Ellie (Elie Docter) bonded over newsreel reports of Paradise Falls, an idyllic patch of South American jungle discovered by the explorer (Christopher Plummer) who traveled there to load his dirigible with evidence of exotic fauna that archaeologists couldn’t even believe. “Adventure is out there!” was the explorer’s motto, and Carl and Ellie meant to make it their own. They’d hoped to visit Paradise Falls someday, but—as a brilliant, moving, elegantly expository montage reveals—life, and death, got in their way.
Now, alone in a neighborhood urbanized beyond recognition, and threatened with relocation from his memory-soaked old Victorian to a retirement home, Carl (now voiced by Ed Asner) decides to send that bunch of balloons up through the chimney and float away from it all—toward the only place he can think to float away to.
If this plan sounds unreasonable, it’s probably because you’re jealous. Carl does have some logistical issues to contend with—most notably the aforementioned porch lingerer, a young Wilderness Explorer and accidental stowaway named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who hopes to earn a merit badge for “assisting the elderly.” In various ways, Russell seems like just the traveling companion Carl deserves, and with help from the peculiarly adorable creatures they accumulate (a talking dog, an exotic bird), they make their way together through a series of dazzling, sometimes harrowingly vertiginous escapades.
Writer-directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s felicity with pace, characterization and sentiment are fully consistent with Pixar’s typically extraordinary animation. In fact, it should be pointed out that Up doesn’t really need to be in 3D at all. For one thing, the glasses make it harder to wipe away tears. For another, the story has plenty of depth and grandeur to begin with.
One arresting moment just before Carl’s launch, when redevelopment looms all around his home, looks like a grateful homage to Virginia Lee Burton’s classic children’s book, The Little House. Then he’s breezed away to other delightfully surreal and more cinematic referents: not just the tornado-twirled house of The Wizard of Oz, but even the hillside-hoisted steamship of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.
Even if these images don’t ring any bells, though, their richness and profundity is palpable. Up floats its own course, and the willful simplicity of its title says it all: It is the opposite of down.
