Film Review: Up (3D) (Spoilers)

There’s something decidedly old fashioned about Disney/Pixar’s latest triumph ‘Up’. It isn’t the casting of Ed (‘Lou Grant’) Asner as widower Carl Fredricksen, it’s not the central premise that a 78 year old widower, rather than suffering the indignity of being forced into a retirement home, should tie hundreds of balloons to his house and simply fly away. It’s more a return to old values of film making, where the craftsmanship was visible in every frame, where the emphasis was on classy storytelling and characterisation instead of just spectacle. Of course ‘Up’ isn’t the first Pixar animated feature with such qualities – ‘Wall-E’ was a masterclass in just these traditional values – but in contrast to its popular predecessor,  ‘Up’ works very hard not to be photo-realistic, not necessarily to reflect reality back to the audience; this is storytelling by caricature and it works like a charm.

Boy adventurer Carl meets Ellie and they spend a lifetime together. She’s his true love, his inspiration, his conduit to the world. Her death leaves him angry, withdrawn and lost, until cub scout Jordan Nagai knocks on his door to do a good deed for the elderly and get the last badge to elude him. Bad timing – it’s just when Carl decides to float his house away from a world which no longer appreciates him (and is ready to tear down his home). The unwilling, inter-generational double act ends up in South America, fulfilling Carl’s childhood dreams, but encounters a mystery on the way. What is the significance of the crazy bird, and why is a pack of talking dogs pursuing it? The answers challenge Carl’s worldview after Ellie’s death, and force him to make some very hard choices. Will he learn the lessons of Ellie’s life in time?

‘Up’ succeeds on a number of levels – it’s a film about heroism in unlikely places, it’s a deftly timed comedy (and some sequences, like this video are hilariously funny), but it’s also a razor sharp character piece; not easy to pull off when the main character is a computer-generated image. Docter and Peterson have created a set of extremely sympathetic, and most importantly interesting characters, and take great pains to let their emotions come through on screen. They’re not alone – Asner is as sensitive as you would expect to his character’s predicament, and lets his anger and nobility simultaneously feed through. Also casting Christopher Plummer was a masterstroke – the simple, yet conflicted authority from him is what you would expect from someone of his pedegree. It’s an unconventional story, whose likely ending is never clear (although that’s not entirely true, this is a Disney film), and Pixar should be congratulated for once more delivering a piece of compelling cinema which appeals to the best in its audience.

9/10

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