The latest wonderful movie from Pixar Animation, Up at last brings us an adventure that cheerfully and confidently goes against the grain of today's culture over-fixated on youth by presenting a hero who also happens to be a curmudgeonly old man. Most family adventure stories present their protagonists as typical, young, gung-ho personalities at times actually too callous to realistically deal with their surroundings, which is why the adventures themselves are often so considerably dumbed down. This movie, by centering on an older protagonist who has retained a nugget of adventurous idealism his whole life, allows the characters and story to have more real emotions and stakes.
The film begins by introducing a wide-eyed, 7-year-old adventure scout named Carl Frederickson, who dreams of going to a lush place in South America called Paradise Falls. He then meets his match in a girl named Ellie, another young explorer who shares the same dream and is even more avid than Carl. This at first seems like the setup for a typical children’s adventure but then quickly and surprisingly segues into a lovely opening montage of their eventual courtship and later marriage. They save money to pursue their dream of traveling to Paradise Falls but everyday life intervenes with their savings, particularly as Ellie becomes sick in their older years. This montage that is so impeccably and movingly told without dialogue and serves as just the setup for our 78-year-old hero, Carl (Ed Asner), is really worth the price of admission all by itself.
Soon, Carl is left as a widower and is then threatened to be placed in a retirement home. So what does he do to honor Ellie’s memory and fulfill their dream without ever actually stepping outside his home? He tethers thousands of balloons to his house to float it to the sky. Everyone who has seen the poster or the previews already knows that but the sequence of the house making its ascent in its entirety is a pure, colorful marvel to behold on screen, particularly with the equally elegant score by Michael Giacchino, which perfectly captures that blithe feeling one gets when seeing a hot air balloon lift off the ground.
Just when Carl is about to relax by himself all the way to Paradise Falls, however, he suddenly hears a startling knock on the door and finds that there is a stowaway on board, an Asian-American boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who is aspiring to be an adventure scout not unlike Carl was when he was young. Carl, being the cranky man that he is, finds him a nuisance particularly after his earlier encounter with Russell and his unusual persistence about helping out an elderly man for a merit badge. Of course, Carl does not have the option to kick him out of the house (although there is a brief, funny fantasy moment in which he fleetingly entertains that thought).
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