Up

Editorial

Having already done washed-up superheroes, cars that talk, a rat who cooks and a mute garbage robot in a blistering post-apocalypse, Pixar here take the next logical step: a melancholy adventure starring a 78-year-old widower and an obese, somewhat backwards eight-year-old boy named Russel.

Up begins in 1939 with a fake newsreel that charts the latest adventure and disappointment of fearless explorer Charles Muntz (Plummer). That the film doesn't stop to ask us if we understand that this references Movietone and its ilk is a bold move. Muntz's trajectory will be important later on, but at this point what we really need to know is that Carl — himself then eight — is in the cinema audience and that he dreams of emulating the adventurer.

Which makes it super sweet when he meets a tomboy named Ellie, who also has grand and exotic plans for her life. These kindred spirits fall in love, grow up, get married and plan to relocate their fixer-upper of a house to Paradise Falls in South America. But it's as they're told they can never have kids... and as they age before our eyes... and as their wild goal is repeatedly thwarted by money problems... that it dawns just how bold Pixar is being with Up.

Happily, the film kicks into colour and humour and life as grumpy old Carl flips the figurative finger at the modern world by floating his entire house up, up and away — bound, finally, for Paradise Falls. What happens when Carl and Russell are forced down by a storm slightly takes the wind out of the film's sails, or, in this case, the helium out of its balloons. Quibbles aside, Up is a journey well worth taking more than once.

Michael Adams