Breaking Down: Up

1:15:40 Dogs playing poker. I really should've seen that one coming. Note that the dog on the right, not having any sleeves, stashes an ace in his collar instead.

1:19:58 The dogs go after Russell with little fighter planes and refer to each other as numbered versions of "Gray Leader." Get it? Because dogs are color blind!

1:20:36 Carl infiltrates the blimp and Muntz attacks him with a sword. He swings wildly, destroying several of his priceless skeletons in the process; his obsession is destroying even the things he's sought to preserve. He also says he's taking the bird back "alive or dead," contradicting himself in the clip from the opening newsreel in which he "[promises] to capture the beast—alive!"




1:24:57 Carl fends Muntz off, runs away, and everyone meets up again on top of the blimp and starts to get into the house to make their escape. Muntz shows up with a gun and starts shooting balloons. The house lands on the top of the blimp and threatens to slide off before Carl grabs the hose and hangs on for dear life.

Muntz tries to break into the house to finally kill his coveted game as the house threatens to fall over the edge. Suddenly, Carl sees an opportunity: get Dug and Russell to grab onto Kevin, who'll jump towards him when she sees chocolate, leaving Muntz in the house behind. This means they have to hang onto each other, and Carl's instructions to Russell are fraught with dramatic irony:

"Don't let go of her!"

The trick works, and Muntz gets his leg caught on a balloon string while trying to jump out. He plummets to his death, a favored death for villains in family films. But in this case, it's particularly appropriate that his death comes from having lost his own spirit of adventure—he has just one little balloon to try to keep him aloft.

1:25:35 Carl's happiness is abated slightly as he watches his house fall beneath the clouds—into his dreams. Russell consoles him and Carl tells him that it's "just a house." And now, finally, that's really all it is to him.

Carl now knows the true widsom of the catchphrase that captivated him as a boy. Muntz said it all his life but died without ever really grasping its larger meaning: adventure is out there, apart from yourself. Adventure is other people.




1:26:51 The blimp takes off again and all the dogs stick their heads out the window. Should've seen that one coming, too.




1:27:11 At the badge awarding ceremony, a scrawny, frightened looking child amusingly receives a badge for something called "Wild Animal Defensive Arts."

Then it's Russell's turn, and he looks around in vain for the father who promised to be there. There's no sign of him, but Carl shows up just in time to take his place to award him "the highest honor I can bestow: the Ellie Badge." Carl pins the Grape Soda cap on Russell's sash, simultaneously filling the hole in Russell's heart while removing the burden on his own.




1:28:20 Carl and Russell sit outside Fenton's ice cream shop (which is a real shop with two locations, both near Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville, California) counting cars, just like Russell used to do with his father (described at 1:05:26). They're even eating the same flavors he mentioned; chocolate and butter brickle. Carl has the son he and Ellie never had, and Russell has the father he needs. And a pet dog, too.

The camera pans up to reveal the Spirit of Adventure hovering above. They carry it with them, both literally and figuratively. Though Carl spends most of the film with thousands of balloons, he begins and ends it with just one. Before he meets Ellie, he has one little balloon. After a lifetime with her, and after meeting Russell, it's a giant blimp, symbolizing his oppenness to new experiences. The more he embraces the outside world, the higher he can go.




1:28:47 We fade back to Paradise Falls, and there are those five notes again; the same ones we heard after Ellie's funeral at 11:27:


The falls are bathed in magenta, just like the church was. We see that the house has landed right next to them, a beautiful gravestone and monument to Ellie and the adventures she had with Carl.

I'll leave you with one last observation, though it is not my own. It's a quote from Christian writer C.S. Lewis that, in retrospect, appears almost presciently suited to describe Up. Perhaps this is not a coincidence, as Docter grew up reading Lewis ⁷ and has made a film that illustrates both the sadness and the beauty of this idea:

"Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."