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| Thursday, September 9th
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| Movie Forums :: Reviews :: Up |
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Posted on 6/02/09
Up
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On the surface, it would seem that adventure films are a form of escapism. Plenty of them are. The ones that stay with us, however, are the ones that lasso their adventures around something; the ones that use extraordinary events to illustrate the simple truths we all experience. Pixar's latest masterpiece, Up, is such a film, and it makes its meaning plainer than most.
The premise of Up is straightforward, even by family film standards: a widower named Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) is in the twilight of his life. Growing up, he idolized famed explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), but never had the adventures he'd dreamed of as a child. He lives alone and is about to be forced into a nursing home, but in an act of defiance, he fastens an unthinkable number of balloons to his house and simply floats away. His destination is a secluded wilderness in South America called Paradise Falls, and he goes there to fulfill the kind of grand promise we make before life has whittled away at our possibilities.
Inevitably, he picks up companions of varying species as he goes, including a young boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai), an exotic bird, and a dog named Dug (Bob Peterson, who also wrote and co-directed the film). Dug wears a special collar that translates his thoughts into speech, and Peterson gets a tremendous amount of comedic mileage out of the idea. The humor will appeal to anyone who's ever looked at a dog and wondered what they were thinking, or tried to understand the frenzied dog logic that causes them to adore strangers, but bark at inanimate objects.
Carl and Russell soon learn that Dug isn't the only one of his kind, however, and that the bird they've befriended is the subject of an obsessive hunt. The mere scarcity of characters makes most of what unfolds fairly obvious, but no less delightful.
The film's most impressive sequence, however, comes before the adventure, as Carl's adult life is summarized in a few short minutes--without dialogue. Pixar has, out of necessity, had to find ways to give life to plain objects and allow characters to express themselves without speaking, and their mastery of these disciplines serves them well here. The sequence benefits from the silence, and is as elegant and powerful as anything they've ever done.
Pixar's design work is gorgeous, as always, though they seem to have given up on rendering believable, to-scale human beings. Instead, they've opted for the kinds of impossibly angular faces that dovetail with their owners' traits. The foliage is perfect to the point at which one doesn't even notice it most of the time, and the rendering of various fabrics seems to have taken a significant step forward. There simply isn't a production studio in the world that makes films more pleasant to look at.
Up doesn't contain the kind of show-stopping excitement of, say, the door-riding scene in Monsters, Inc., the race through the ship in WALL-E, or any of the action sequences in The Incredibles, but it's far funnier than anything Pixar's done in years, and the extreme locales enhance the otherwise modest thrills.
This is an odd film: the hero is a geriatric, his sidekicks are unusually eclectic, and even the villain and his "henchmen" are atypical. It carries with it an unusually advanced message for a family film. The obligatory "it's never too late to do so-and-so" meme is present, to be sure, but it's not what Up is really about. It praises something much more ordinary and powerful, and suggests that the kinds of choices we think life has forced us into are really exactly what we wanted. Life, itself, is the adventure.
NOTE: I must mention the short preceding the film, Partly Cloudy, which explores the logistical difficulties of the baby-delivering stork. It doesn't reach the comedic heights of Presto or For the Birds, but like all of their shorts, it's clever and does a great deal with its scant runtime. Give Pixar five minutes, and they'll make you care about something.
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