Film Reviews: "Up"

UP, UP & HOORAY!

PIXAR'S EXCITING, AFFECTING 'UP' IS OUT OF THIS WORLD

By Lou Lumenick
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
May 29, 2009

PIXAR extends the longest winning streak in Hollywood history with "Up," an exquisite work of cinematic art that also happens to be the funniest, most touching, most exciting and most entertaining movie released so far this year.

The animation studio's latest instant classic -- and its first offered in 3-D in many theaters -- is also the best directed and written film I've seen thus far in 2009, and quite possibly this century.

Yes, that is an unqualified endorsement -- and the point where I say I'd really prefer you stop reading and go enjoy this movie without a lot of advance information.

This is a hugely imaginative and magical fantasy adventure that explores issues such as loss and dreams deferred with such a light and universal touch that it will appeal to an extremely broad audience.

Directors Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") and Bob Peterson and their co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy brilliantly draw on such cinematic touchstones as "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Wizard of Oz." They're also inspired by less likely sources such as "Fitzcarraldo," "The Red Balloon" and Jules Verne's "The Lost World" -- not to mention Warner Bros.' animated Road Runner and even the logo of its archrival, DreamWorks Animation.

All of this is deftly wrapped in a deceptively simple story. The main protagonist, Carl Fredricksen, is first seen as a youngster in a wondrous prologue watching a newsreel in which his hero, adventurer Charles Muntz, is accused of fabricating a giant bird skeleton he claims to have brought back from South America.

Carl's faith is unshaken, and he finds a kindred spirit in young Ellie -- whom he eventually marries when they grow up. For years they dream of visiting Paradise Falls, the site of Muntz's supposed discovery, but this never happens for a variety of reasons culminating in Ellie's death many decades later.

In the film proper, Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) is a grumpy 78-year-old who greatly resembles Spencer Tracy toward the end of his career. Carl has shut himself in the home he shared with Ellie and is defying efforts by a real-estate developer to relocate him to a retirement community.

When matters come to a head, Carl comes up with an ingenious -- and quite magical -- way to stay in the house: thousands of balloons he uses to lift it off its foundations and on its way to Paradise Falls.

Turns out he has a stowaway: Russell (Jordan Nagai), an 8-year-old Junior Wilderness Explorer who Carl finds endlessly annoying -- but who turns out to be an asset on his improbable journey.

There are more surprises when they get to South America, including the brilliantly colored bird that Muntz claimed to discover, whom Russell nicknames Kevin, and a pack of dogs with electronic collars that translate their thoughts into words.

There are plenty of laughs and action sequences -- including chases and a sword fight -- that will delight the kids, punctuated with poignant moments of yearning.

I saw "Up" projected in 3-D, expertly deployed to draw the audience into the film's elaborate textures and stunning backgrounds, which include mountains over which Carl and Russell drag the house on ropes.

But this film is so eye-popping -- the colors and images are so vivid -- that this is the rare 3-D movie you can see in 2-D without feeling the least bit cheated.

"Up," which packs a dozen good films' worth of fun, wisdom and artistry into 89 minutes with a minimum of dialogue, is as satisfying an experience as I've had in a movie theater in years.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com

Up

Two cranks and a plucky kidin an Up-lifting aerial tale

by Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
May 27, 2009
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/

"Up" is a wonderful film, with characters who are as believable as any characters can be who spend much of their time floating above the rain forests of Venezuela. They have tempers, problems and obsessions. They are cute and goofy, but they aren't cute in the treacly way of little cartoon animals. They're cute in the human way of the animation master Hayao Miyazaki. Two of the three central characters are cranky old men, which is a wonder in this youth-obsessed era. "Up" doesn't think all heroes must be young or sweet, although the third important character is a nervy kid.

This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation. The movie was directed by Pete Docter, who also directed "Monsters, Inc.," wrote "Toy Story" and was a co-writer on "WALL-E" before leaving to devote full time to this project. So Docter's one of the leading artists of this latest renaissance of animation.

The movie will be shown in 3-D in some theaters, about which I will say nothing, except to advise you to save the extra money and see it in 2-D. One of the film's qualities that is likely to be diminished by 3-D is its subtle and beautiful color palette. "Up," like "Finding Nemo," "Toy Story," "Shrek" and "The Lion King," uses colors in a way particularly suited to its content.

"Up" tells a story as tickling to the imagination as the magical animated films of my childhood, when I naively thought that because their colors were brighter, their character outlines more defined and their plots simpler, they were actually more realistic than regular films.

It begins with a romance as sweet and lovely as any I can recall in feature animation. Two children named Carl and Ellie meet and discover they share the same dream of someday being explorers. In newsreels, they see the exploits of a daring adventurer named Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who uses his gigantic airship to explore a lost world on a plateau in Venezuela and then bring back the bones of fantastic creatures previously unknown to man. When his discoveries are accused of being faked, he flies off enraged to South America again, vowing to bring back living creatures to prove his claims.

Nothing is heard from him for years. Ellie and Carl (Edward Asner) grow up, have a courtship, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together and grow old. This process is silent, except for music (the elder Ellie doesn't even have a voice credit). It's shown by Docter in a lovely sequence, without dialogue, that deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation. The lovebirds save their loose change in a gallon jug intended to finance their trip to the legendary Paradise Falls, but real life gets in the way: flat tires, home repairs, medical bills. Then they make a heartbreaking discovery. This interlude is poetic and touching.

The focus of the film is on Carl's life after Ellie. He becomes a recluse, holds out against the world, keeps his home as a memorial, talks to the absent Ellie. One day he decides to pack up and fly away -- literally. Having worked all his life as a balloon man, he has the equipment on hand to suspend the house from countless helium-filled balloons and fulfill his dream of seeking Paradise Falls. What he wasn't counting on was an inadvertent stowaway, Russell (Jordan Nagai), a dutiful Wilderness Explorer Scout, who looks Asian American.

What they find at Paradise Falls and what happens there I will not say. But I will describe Charles Muntz's gigantic airship that is hovering there. It's a triumph of design, and perhaps owes its inspiration, though not its appearance, to Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky." The exterior is nothing special: a really big zeppelin. But the interior is one of those movie spaces you have the feeling you'll remember.

With vast inside spaces, the airship is outfitted like a great ocean liner from the golden age, with a stately dining room, long corridors, a display space rivaling the Natural History Museum and an attic spacious enough to harbor fighter planes. Muntz, who must be a centenarian by now, is hale, hearty and mean, his solitary life shared only by robotic dogs.

The adventures on the jungle plateau are satisfying in a Mummy/ Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones sort of way. But they aren't the whole point of the film. This isn't a movie like "Monsters vs. Aliens," which is mostly just frenetic action. There are stakes here, and personalities involved, and two old men battling for meaning in their lives. And a kid who, for once, isn't smarter than all the adults. And a loyal dog. And an animal sidekick. And always that house and those balloons.

A longer version is here:http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/05/up_up_and_away_in_my_beautiful.html
Cast & Credits
With the voices of:
Carl- Edward Asner
Russell- Jordan Nagai
Muntz- Christopher Plummer
Dug- Bob Peterson
Beta- Delroy Lindo
Gamma- Jerome Raft
Tom- John Ratzenberger

Disney/Pixar presents a film directed by Pete Docter. Written by Bob Peterson. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG (for some peril and action).

copyright 2005, rogerebert.com


Up and Away

The latest Pixar film impresses, as expected.

By Frederica Mathewes-Green
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 29, 2009

I knew Up was one of those rare first-rate movies when I found myself really yearning to see it for a second time. Actually, that wouldn’t have been so unusual, except that I was still sitting in the theater and had only gotten through 20 minutes of seeing it for the first time. It’s that good.

And that in itself isn’t so unusual, considering that this is a film from Pixar Studios, whose previous films (Wall-E, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story) have been not only excellent, but also original. Leave it to the other animation studios to crank out films in which bland themes (like “Follow Your Dreams”) provide vehicles for pop-culture references and gross-out jokes. In recent years, Pixar gave us a robot cleaning up an abandoned planet Earth, a rat who wants to be a French chef, superheroes chafing under forced retirement, and the courageous monsters who must inhabit children’s closets. Imagination still exists, in some quarters.

The central image of Up is of an elderly man towing a house. He’s pulling it along by means of a garden hose connected to a low faucet, and the building is held aloft by masses of helium balloons, though it sinks a little lower every day. The man is crossing a flat, dark-gray landscape interrupted by pillars of rocks stacked in inscrutable patterns. (You can say, “Yeah, yeah, the old ‘man-towing-a-house’ story,” but I promise this one’s different.)

The house, you see, is a Valentine. Seventy years before, Carl Frederickson met his bride, Ellie, in this house. At the time it was broken-down and abandoned, but when they married they bought it and fixed it up. From childhood Carl and Ellie had cherished a dream of emulating their hero, intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, and the whimsical expression of this dream was a childish crayon sketch of their home at the edge of South America’s Paradise Falls. (The film’s crew journeyed to Venezuela’s Tabletop Mountains for inspiration.) Now Ellie has died, every other structure around the home has been bulldozed, and since the couple was childless, Carl’s life seems pointless and empty. So he’s going to put that house at the edge of Paradise Falls, if — as he says, and as seems likely — “it kills me.”

But that isn’t what kids are going to like, or even notice, about this movie. For them, it’s mostly about Dug the talking dog, and Russell, Carl’s chubby eight-year-old sidekick, and Kevin, a glorious, 13-foot-tall iridescent bird. This is a really hilarious movie, and there are plenty of chases and action sequences, too (this is only the second Pixar film to have a PG rating, in this case for “peril”). But, as in other Pixar films, there is an intriguing theme underneath all the fun; here, as before, the theme has to do with the goodness of marriage and family life, and the self-sacrificing love a parent (or parent-figure) has for a child.

In a way, Up is a variation on It’s a Wonderful Life. Carl regrets that he was never able to bring Ellie to Paradise Falls, but he comes to see that their ordinary hometown life was a sweet and significant adventure in itself, one that gave Ellie joy. Russell finds that the wilderness is “more wild” than he expected, and “not like they say in books,” and that what he misses is eating ice cream and counting cars with his dad: “It might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is what I remember most.”

We also see that someone who looks like a grumpy old man can be instead an interesting old man, courageous and inventive. He’s not “grumpy” on general principles, but for the very good reason that he has lost the love of his life. We see that there is such a thing as love for a lifetime, and that love between people who have grown old together is beautiful. And we see Carl register it as a real tragedy when he learns that Russell’s dad has gone on to a new wife, one who tells Russell “not to phone and bug him so much.”

Up is remarkable for other reasons: It is the first animated film to open the Cannes Film Festival, and the first 3-D movie from Pixar. The 3-D effects are used as artistic elements to support the story, rather than just calling attention to themselves. For example, 3-D is used to shorten the perspective and induce a confined feeling as we see Carl spending lonely days in the house after Ellie has gone. In a typically clever shot, Carl chugs slowly across the screen on his stair-glide, to the sultry strains of the “Havanaise” from Carmen.

The most eye-popping use of 3-D actually comes in the Disney and Pixar logos, before the movie itself begins. After the logos fade, we see something that looks familiar: rows of heads before us in a theater, watching a movie. That film turns out to be a 1930s-era newsreel of the dashing explorer Charles Muntz, and we step into the story as we see Carl as a child, watching along with us. Pretty nifty.

The one thing I disliked was that once the characters are all in place, the film becomes simply a series of action sequences. (I had the same criticism of Finding Nemo.) It’s as if the plot pauses, and we just keep re-running the loop of danger, chase, battle, escape, in different settings. We don’t learn anything new about the characters, because the last chase sequence already demonstrated that they are either courageous (good guys) or nefarious (bad guys). For me, this phase of the movie just drags, though of course for many audience members the action scenes will be the best part.

The filmmakers do deserve kudos for making the extra effort of rendering such scenes true-to-life in terms of weight, texture, and impact; it isn’t simply as big and loud as possible. This goes for the whole film. You’ve probably never seen a house held up by helium balloons, but it just feels right — you will believe a house can fly. The structure creaks and leans the way you think it would, and when Carl cuts a few balloon strings to lower it a bit, they ping the way they ought to. Early on the house sails into a lightning storm, and it feels like the real thing (this might be the scariest part of the film for little ones).

I was also impressed that, having given us the house as a symbol of Carl and Ellie’s love, the filmmakers allow it to be bashed and damaged on its dangerous journey. The cost of this adventure is real, but it’s worth it — a lesson Russell, along with all the kids watching, will find useful when he himself is 78.

— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.