To say that "Up", the latest in a long line of commercial and critical successes for Pixar, is imaginative, artful, and heads above its competition is almost redundant at this point. In fact, Pixar's films have maintained such a high level of quality that the only categories you can break them up into now are "amazing" and "Cars".
But with this expectation comes a dangerous complacency, not on the side of the animators, but on that of the audience. Because of Pixar's success, it would be easy to dismiss "Up" for anything less than what it is: brilliant.
The film follows Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), an elderly widower whose house is being suffocated by the urban sprawl that has slowly surrounded him during his years there. He decides one day to fulfill a promise he made to his wife when they were young and move his house to Paradise Falls, a "place that time forgot" in South America.
He achieves this in a rather unconventional way: with thousands of balloons. He soon finds himself, along with a stowaway Boy Scout named Russell (Jordan Nagai), in a valley with talking dogs, giant multi-colored birds and a long-lost adventurer (Christopher Plummer).
Once in the valley, he starts his long trek to the top of the waterfall, carrying his barely floating house (and by extension, his past) behind him. Life, as it tends to do, throws a number of problems Carl's way, things that prevent him from getting directly to his destination. He becomes annoyed with Russell and the responsibility he has unwillingly inherited, and sees the boy and the various other characters he meets along the way as road blocks keeping him from his house and his childhood adventure. Russell slowly pulls Carl away from his curmudgeon default, and Carl sees that it all might be the other way around.
The premise is cartoonish, but it's often easy to forget that the film itself is a cartoon. The film is full of laughs, but the moments that stay with you are ones of pain, fear and genuine heartbreak. During an extended series of vignettes at the film's beginning, we see Carl fall in love, get married and experience the highs and lows of growing old with someone, of truly experiencing "'til death do us part."
These are complex characters in a complex world, and the film, directed by Pete Doctor, profits greatly from giving children the benefit of the doubt, trusting much more in their capacity of understanding than companies like Dreamworks historically have.
Pixar isn't working with anything necessarily new here; its characters are archetypal, their growth is a fait accompli, but the time and effort poured into them and the film itself make "Up" anything but kids' stuff.
5.0/5.0
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