During the first 20 minutes of Up, I thought it one of the best movies I’d ever seen. Then something happened -- it floated away to a place entirely different, a place where dogs talk and a bird’s a boy’s best friend. Frankly, it lost me. But the kids in the theater started having a blast.
Let me back up a bit. Up is the latest movie from the Pixar and it’s as marvelous a work of animation as anything they have yet produced. It rivals Wall-E and The Incredibles for ambition and dazzling artistry and has a story even more moving.
It has remarkably concise storytelling. At the start, a boy named Carl meets girl named Ellie, boy gets girl, boy and girl experience all of life’s hopes and dreams and losses and letdowns, boy and girl grow old together, and boy outlives girl. It is like an entire movie’s worth of love affair compressed into 20 minutes, briskly paced, deeply moving.
Then, the elderly Carl, about to be forced out of the home he shared with Ellie and placed in a “home,” decides to check out in his own way. He ominously goes into the house, closes the door with resigned finality, and …releases thousands of balloons which lift the house right off its foundation, sending it soaring. His stated destination: Paradise Falls.
It’s a – pardon me – beautifully uplifting scene, filled with hope and anticipation, but also touched by sadness and resignation. And just as Carl takes flight, leaving all worldly concerns far below, so does the movie, leaving behind all sense of what is and is not possible. Can a bunch of balloons tied by ordinary string really carry a house all the way from a North American city to a South American rain forest?
I was entranced by the movie, but, quite noticeably, the children were growing restless. Then, as if sensing they were weary of reality and yearning for fantasy, the movie sent balloons to their rescue and settled them back into their seats. Is there a child alive who hasn’t held a balloon and dreamed of being lifted up, up, and away by it?
Article comments
1 - Britney
Part of the magic of movies, especially movies such as Up, The Incredibles, Toy Story, and other amazing hits from Pixar, is called willing suspension of disbelief. Willing suspension of disbelief is part of the audience's role in theatre. Without supernatural and extrodinary events we would be watching everyday life - and who wants to watch that?!
2 - Todd Ford
It's not a matter of suspension of disbelief that I struggle with concerning Up. It's a matter of the film carefully establishing an internal logic only to throw it out the window in favor of an entirely different, even opposite, internal logic. While I didn't go so far in my review, my teenage daughter and I actually entertain the reading that Carl dies when he goes into the house. The remainder of the movie then being his dying fantasy until he winds up in heaven in the final shot. Afterall, everything that happens (Wizard of Oz-like) during the "South American" scenes is reformulations of things that happened during the first 20 minutes and nothing is contained with those scenes that would be beyond the knowledge of a man who had only seen South America in pictures and postcards.