Up (2009)

For a stretch of time in the early 1990s, Disney's feature animation studio could do no wrong. They released a famous series of films, beginning with 1989's The Little Mermaid, with broad appeal and consistently high production values. Of course it couldn't last. Later-90s outings suffered in popularity and, some would say, creativity. But it seems that now there's a new animation king in town: Disney's partner Pixar. Beginning with 1995's Toy Story, Pixar has slowly climbed to the top of the heap, producing well-made, likable, intelligent animation. Like Disney of the early '90s, they can't seem to make a bad movie. And so it is that much expectation and good-will greeted their most recent product, Up. It's the tale of an adventurous old man who lifts his house from the ground with helium balloons. Up is not the most spectacular animated film Pixar has turned out, but it has the company's trademark wit, a generous amount of beauty, and a surprising amount of heart and soul. Like the house tied to all those balloons, this film flies.

The film begins with a young child in a movie house, watching black-and-white newsreels. The subject is the adventurer Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer), a sort of cross between Howard Hughes and Indiana Jones. Muntz travels the world in his massive dirigible, the "Sprit of Adventure," collecting specimens of the odd with the help of a pack of highly trained dogs. When scientists scoff at some of Muntz's "finds," the explorer retreats to South America in a huff, vowing to vindicate his discoveries. Muntz is not heard of again, but he lives on in the mind of his young fan, Carl. Carl roams the neighborhood with his own "dirigible" (a balloon on a string) and pretends to be off on adventures. One day, he meets a gap-toothed chatterbox of a girl named Ellie. She, too idolizes Muntz, and dreams of taking her ramshackle clubhouse to the famed site of Muntz's discoveries: Paradise Falls, in South America. From the moment they meet, Ellie does not stop talking about her adventures and plans. Carl just stares wide-eyed, and can't even introduce himself. "You don't talk much, kid," she tells him with a smile. "I like you."

Indeed she does. We flash forward through a series of wordless vignettes showing Carl and Ellie as adults: they marry, they take jobs at the local zoo (she a birdkeeper, he a balloon vendor), they fix up the clubhouse and move into it, and they begin saving to make the trip to Paradise Falls. But circumstances, accidents, and family tragedies intervene and soak up the savings. They stay put, growing old together until Ellie departs on her final adventure, leaving Carl (now voiced by Ed Asner) a widower in the dear old clubhouse/home they built together. There he sits, going through his daily routine while corporate sprawl engulfs his once-quiet house, talking to his absent Ellie. The suits want to buy his home. Carl says no. Russell, an eager Boy Scout type, shows up and asks if he can assist Carl in any way (he needs a merit badge). Carl says no. Offers arrive from a local posh retirement home. Carl says no.

But after a particularly nasty run-in with the developers, something has to give, and Carl decides to leave. Drawing on his lifetime of inflatable-object experience, he ties a mighty host of helium balloons to his house, and, with a compass and Ellie's old adventuring scrapbook in hand, means to fly to Paradise Falls. Along for the ride, it turns out, is young Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), who hasn't yet given up on assisting Carl. Of course they make it to Paradise Falls, if not exactly smoothly, and there they meet the long-lost Muntz. He lives alone with his dogs and has gone more than a little obsessively crazy from decades of searching for an elusive brightly colored exotic bird. Any guesses who the bird finds and befriends first?

This is without a doubt one of the more beautiful films in recent memory. It is alive with color, most notably in the form of Carl's balloons (notice the way they refract light) and the giant exotic bird. Up is offered in 3-D in some markets, but I fail to see what that would add. Simply as rendered and colored, the images all but jump off the screen. Equally noteworthy is the attention to detail: from clothing textures to dog fur to tennis ball fuzz. Look closely, and you'll see that Carl develops beard stubble over the course of his journey. Then remember that in animation, all these details have to be drawn. Unlike live-action, there are no "happy accident" shots. On the other hand, animators can design any sort of location they like, and in Up we are treated to many finely realized ones. The movie has neither Finding Nemo's undersea wonders nor WALL-E's spacescape grandeur, but Ellie's clubhouse, Muntz's improbably roomy Jules-Verne-style dirigible, and the towering cliffs of Paradise Falls all linger in the memory.

For all that, though, I found myself concerned with the movie's look only secondarily. Up proves that one key to Pixar's success is that they still focus on story rather than spectacle. The wordless story of Carl and Ellie's younger life is a case in point. Much of the film's genius is on display in this section. It's as sweet and graceful a bit of storytelling as I've seen onscreen in some time, and it establishes these characters as people we know and care about. It's worth noting that there is no voice credit for the adult Ellie, but she is one of the most important, and memorable, characters in the film. Carl, who is made up almost entirely of squares (from his face to his eyeglasses to his fingernails), also emerges as a personality, not just a type. He has feelings and motivations and is not just a common grump or a crusty meanie. Notice how he tries to get rid of Russell: not just with a "get off the porch," but with a clever (fake) story about bothersome snipe in his yard. Of course Ed Asner, our reigning specialist in likable curmudgeonry, is perfect as Carl's voice. The rest of the cast is dependable as well. Plummer is both suitably august and suitably unhinged as the obsessed Muntz, Nagai lets us see how Russell annoys Carl without actually annoying us, and Bob Peterson provides many laughs as the "voice" of one of Muntz's dogs who befriends our heroes. All Muntz's dogs are fitted with high-tech collars that translate their thoughts into human speech. One of the many pleasures of the movie is that they say exactly the sorts of things you'd expect dogs would say, if they could.

The best word I can find for this film (appropriately for the summer season) is "refreshing." It's refreshing to see a summer film that has both heart and smarts. It's refreshing to see an animated film where not just jokes but real story elements are aimed at adults (kids will not understand, unless they know a great deal about their own or siblings' origins, why Ellie cries in a doctor's office, nor will they get the not-always-funny symbolism of a man literally roped to his house). It's refreshing to see in Carl a non-standard hero (and the film has easily the coolest old-guy fight in a movie since Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee duked it out as dueling wizards in Lord of the Rings). And it's even refreshing to see "talking" dogs in a movie allowed to act like dogs rather than four-legged humans. Mostly, though, it's refreshing to find, in a time when even many "live-action" movies aim only to wow us with computer effects, that an entirely computer-made film aims primarily to entertain us with that most old-fashioned movie technology: good visual storytelling. For now, Pixar's reputation is secure. There's real uplift here, and not just from the balloons.