I have a bad habit of waiting for movies to come out on DVD before I go see them. Well, it's probably not that bad of a habit, all things considered; saves money that way. But in this case I really am sorry I didn't get to see it sooner - UP is a definite Pixar classic, even if it is perhaps the most deliberately melancholy of the studio's full-length animated films yet. If you haven't seen UP yet, please read no further, since there are bound to be spoilers.
To my mind, Pixar is at its best when telling stories which subvert the audience's expectations. To a society which expects them to sell toys and embrace an ethic of instant gratification and conspicuous consumerism, Pixar introduces WALL-E, a love-struck prophet-jester with the body of a rusty Rubik's Cube and the soul of Charlie Chaplin, bearing a message of community, social responsibility and environmental conservation. To a society which over-glamourises Adonic youths and gives them so many of its leading roles, Pixar gives Carl Fredericksen - a curmudgeonly old man with a cane whose grand unfulfilled dreams of adventure with his departed wife continue to drive him forward.
The first twenty minutes of the film describing the backstory of Carl Fredericksen (the main character voice-acted by Ed Asner) were heartwrenching; in loving detail, the film presents Carl's childhood dreams of adventure which he shares with his friend (and later, wife) Ellie - and proceeds in a montage of showing how those dreams are battered and pushed aside by life's bitter realities, culminating in Ellie's death. We see Carl's life afterward as he is left behind with his memories, protecting his and Ellie's home from the assaults of an uncaring capitalist modernity. The movie then takes off suddenly in a shamelessly Vernesque way. Even as the forces of modernity have seemingly triumphed and are about to put Carl away in a nursing home and tear down his house for new development, Carl decides to bid farewell and take off for South America in his house, to which he has attached an enormous regiment of helium balloons and a couple of bed-linens for steering.
This movie is about adventure, after all, and boy does Carl end up taking it - along with Russell (a young, ingenuous and overly-helpful 'Wilderness Explorer' who needs one last badge for 'Assisting the Elderly'), Dug (a dog who suspiciously channels the character of Caboose from Red vs. Blue) and Kevin (an ineptly-named rare flightless bird who is trying to get back to her chicks, and whose last name is probably MacGuffin) - who encounter an unlikely villain who is one part Eugène Dubois and two parts Charles Lindbergh with generous dashes of Cecil Rhodes and Laurence Olivier thrown in (and voice-acted, with appropriate malicious flair, by Christopher Plummer). There are also some fun visual gags that tickled my fanboy-bone: a secret lair and a chase scene which were obvious hat-tips to the Indiana Jones movies, an aerial scene which is unabashedly recalls the X-Wing assault on the first Death Star in A New Hope, and an escape which is slighly reminiscent of the Blackbird chapter in CHRONO TRIGGER but doesn't end up quite the same way.
It is an incredibly satisfying movie in its own right, however, allowing us to empathise easily with the hero's eccentricities and flaws. It allows us to grieve when he grieves, sigh with relief when he makes his peace with his wife's death and cheer when he swoops in to save the day in his floating house. I heartily recommend UP, though with the definite and apologetic admission that this recommendation comes only for those later in the day than I am.
I hope my next movie review comes in a more timely fashion, but I make no promises.
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