I didn’t watch Up in 3D, but I didn’t really care as I just wanted to see it regardless of what dimension was offered to me. Anyway, on the movie itself, Carl may be a crotchety old geezer, but I think he’s Pixar’s most relatable character yet. We got to see how he meets his wife Ellie and the trials and tribulations throughout their lives. When Ellie passes away, Carl tries to do everything he can to bring them to Paradise Falls since he thinks he failed to fulfill her life goal. It turns out that she found something even better than that: Carl himself. His discovery was really a beautiful moment. Also I want a dog like Dug.

really should signify that the people at Pixar are amazing filmmakers/storytellers first and foremost, and appeal to Disney’s dogmatic commercial formulas and childrens’ themes secondarily.
it’s tough not to take for granted their attention to art direction, music, writing, and casting/character design, because project after project from them just seems so spot on—-it’s tough to imagine most of these stories being told any other way, or with any other people.

anyways, this film for me may be the most heartfelt and touching of any in the Pixar series. While Toy Story identified with an audience that had trouble letting go of toys, and the real emotions+sentiments tied to those toys, UP should identify with people who have trouble letting go of people. Death sucks. Deadbeat parents suck. Unattainable dreams suck. Growing old sucks. Failed heroes suck. As someone who just lost a grandfather, I can say this movie touches on themes more universal than maybe I won’t even realize until I myself am his age.

But in the end, everyone has to keep moving on. And if you choose to live life, you have to keep moving UP.

btw, it’s completely worth checking out behind-the-scenes early artwork development from UP:

overrated. I slept through the last half hour. Part of this is due to the Giants’ keeping me up late on the east coast every night, but I always go to the movies on Saturday and somehow manage to stay awake all the way through. Maybe it was the dark 3D glasses, but it started off touching and sentimental and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It was better than I expected. Pretty good actually…

Although I have to admit that some of the science in that movie left a lot to be desired.

took my kids (3 & 6) to it yesterday. I thought it was a really good film. My 3yr old still can’t watch a whole movie all the way through without losing interest, but he survived. I thought it started out on a pretty low note. After Ellie died, my son was asking me when it would be over. I assured him it would get happy and fun soon (I hoped!). It did. I thought the talking dogs were great.

Looking forward to Toy Story 3 next summer.

Did everyone else see the dark cloud and the stork short before the movie? That was great. My daughter found the beg. to be sad. We both enjoyed the movie, her first in 3D. I liked the villain and the hero as elderly men.

This movie was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed it. And the theme is important.

So many people today feel that doing things (adventurous, grand things; which includes careers making) is what is truly important in life. Because of this, too many people neglect what is truly important. I know this sounds all hokey, but it is true.

It’s very important that Russell’s dad isn’t just a dead-beat, but is also a dead-beat who has done/accomplished a lot. Russell describes him as always busy, and some one who has done a lot of things. Yet, he has left Russell neglected.

This is a perfect reflection for Carl. Carl feels that he hasn’t accomplished anything in his life (which prompts the trip to S. America). Yet, his wife (the truly adventurous one in their relationship) felt otherwise.

I agree with Positive Euphemism about the symbolism (the shot of their chairs side by side at the falls was wonderful). Ellie’s message: “Thanks for the adventure. Now go have a new one.” was perfect. And, of course, Carl understood the message exactly as it was meant to be understood. The new adventure wasn’t another trip like going to the falls. It was Russell and Dug.

The simple importance of family, both real and adopted, is so often neglected today. It’s refreshing that Pixar hasn’t just one, but two films that are centered on family.

And, yes, the montage was fantastic. That, combined with the scene where we first meet Ellie, made me fall in love with her in those few short minutes.

I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m predicting I will cry like a baby at it.

Sounds great. I’m seeing it after work tomorrow for sure. I’ve been reading some reviews and commentary on the film saying it scared/troubled young children. Goes along with the verdict here that it is not a kids movie.

Saw it Saturday with my wife. She cried. Twice.

Amazing movie. I was awestruck by the entire thing.

And it was called A View to a Kill.

Up did a hell of a lot of really good things, the most important being that it is emotionally affective in a way that is simply hard to find in movies. Within ten minutes of the start of the movie, it’s a struggle not to cry. And that’s just one of a handful of truly touching moments. Being able to elicit that kind of an emotional response in what are largely isolated moments is a hell of an accomplishment.

Thematically, it’s got a lot going on. I think there are two themes that really stood out to me. The first is the idea of having to deal with losing people over the course of your life. For Carl, this is obvious in one aspect: he’s actively dealing with the loss of his wife, Ellie. It’s largely what drives him to go on his adventure (though the prospect of losing his house, which stands for his wife anyway, is the active impetus). But we also understand that he has to deal with the loss of a child and, later, the loss of a hero (first in the sense of the ideal of the hero, and then of course the guy literally dies to drive the point home). But I think it’s Russell who really drives the point home. His losses aren’t the same as Carl’s. He’s lost his father, but not because his father has died. There’s the hint that he’s lost his mother, even, or that she at least doesn’t play an important or authoritative role in his life.

I think with Russell, the implications of his losses help to illuminate his character a lot. They don’t force him to dwell on his situation, but you understand why he’s so determined to get his badge and why he attaches himself so strongly to a male figure (but not, in my opinion, a father figure), but it also informs his determination to reunite a mother (the bird) with her children. As one who has suffered weak or absent parenting, he’s both looking for structure and trying to keep others from having to experience that lack of structure.

With Carl, I actually think this theme is less decisive. Though he’s burdened with a stronger series of events (the two most poignant involving the actual death of a family member), we only ever see him actively dealing with one of them. And, for much of the movie, we’re actually inferring that externally. We see the symbol, which is the house, and we see his emotional displacement whenever the house is in danger. But he completely displaces his feelings for Ellie into the house, with no exception until the moment that he sheds the burden of the house, and that’s a little bit of a problem for me. It’s not a big problem, almost nitpicking even, but for me… I need him to struggle with the loss of the person in a more personal and less offset way. It feels unbalanced that we only see him struggling with Ellie the house, and never with Ellie the person – even once he’s shed the burden of the object, it seems that he doesn’t spend more than a moment reflecting on the person.

But where Russell’s actions are informed by the problems with both of his parents, I don’t think that Carl’s actions are informed by much other than the loss of his wife. The loss of his child creates a problem for me. You could read his relationship with Russell as a surrogate fathership, and they give you enough to go on to make that reading, but I find it completely unsatisfying. I don’t think that he can be anything resembling a surrogate father, and outside of the last two minutes, you don’t see him acting fatherly toward Russell in any way. I do think he’s a role model and a companion, but he comes into both of these positions pretty grudgingly. Russell practically forces him into both. Which is why I don’t think the loss of the child is playing into the dynamic in any significant way.

And the loss of the hero acts more as a plot device than an emotional one.

As for the other theme that I think informs the whole film, it’s actually quite related. At first I wanted to think of it as a theme of family, but I actually think that it is much more an issue of the almost-family. Carl and Ellie spent their lives as a family, but never the family that they had envisioned. They never got to be parents and their family, however fulfilling, was always incomplete. As Carl is concerned, I also believe it’s significant that we never see or experience anything resembling a family for him. In his childhood, we don’t see or hear about his parents. He doesn’t have any pictures of his family and they are, for all intents and purposes, absent. Ultimately, I believe that Carl escapes the disappointment of his incomplete family life. By the end of the movie he seems completely secure in the completeness of his life with Ellie, and that’s a beautiful thing.

For Russell, the theme of the almost-family is also ever-present, but for him it never reaches the point of resolution – and naturally so, as he’s going to be dealing with that for a long time.

And then for the explorer (whose name escapes me), he embodies the very, very extreme of this idea. His family, his companionship, is completely incomplete, completely devoid of human compassion or human interests. He’s so far gone, even, that he can’t be salvaged, and it’s one of the reasons that it makes sense for him to die, even in the context of a so-called children’s movie – there is nothing for him to be alive for, as he is completely detached from life itself.

But the movie was great for more than that. It’s not insignificant that Russell is an Asian-American, nor that it wasn’t even until more than halfway through the movie before everyone I know, including me, even realized it. It’s a progressive choice but it’s treated by the studio and the animators as nothing less than the most natural thing in the world. No attention is brought to the point. He doesn’t have an accent. He doesn’t make jokes about rice. It’s not a statement. It’s just a fact. And it’s handled extremely well by Pixar.

And let’s not forget the pretty animation. One of the giddiest moments I had in the movie was when I noticed that Carl was growing stubble. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s exactly that kind of attention to detail that makes watching the visual art of the film worthwhile. But it’s not the only accomplishment. Something has to be said for giving the house weight (and weightlessness) as it floats, sinks, pulls, etc. And then there is the sheer number of environments in the movie – of which there are many. Visually, it’s not the piece of art that Wall-E was, but it’s still extremely rewarding.

And the other great thing about the movie is that it’s probably the funniest Pixar movie. And based on my first impression, I don’t think it’s even close. The movie is a fucking riot. It’s funny for kids. It’s funny for adults. It’s sharp and witty and fast and rarely, rarely misses with a punch-moment. It’s a real comedic accomplishment.

But the movie also troubles me somewhat deeply. As I alluded to above, I find the movie, as emotionally stunning as it is at times, to be somewhat cold. While Carl has a limited number of profoundly emotional moments, they aren’t tied together by many – or… any? – worthwhile small ones. It’s almost as though when he’s not confronted by a particularly trying situation, the emotional weight of the story is out of sight, out of mind for Carl. I’m overstating the point to make my point, but it troubled me that I found so much of the movie to be vaguely empty when it was framed by such deeply touching individual scenes.

The biggest problem for me, though, was that this movie required a near impossible level of suspension of disbelief for me, in a way that I haven’t experienced from Pixar before. Robots in love? Yeah, I can get behind that. Superheroes, talking animals, animate toys, weirdo cars, monsters? No problem! A 75+ year-old-man jumping around the exterior of a blimp like a 20-year-old? Now that’s a problem for me. More than in any other Pixar movie, I had to swallow my disbelief to accept a large number of scenes. I believe that you could pull a house when it’s floating in midair because I’ve singlehandedly pulled a huge boat while it’s sitting in the water. But could a 12(?)-year-old stop the inertia of that moving object, and then reverse that inertia by the strength of his own preadolescent body? I don’t know about that. And that kind of thing happens a lot. In a movie based largely in the real world, this one takes a lot of liberties with reality.

Since I’m at about 1500 words, I’ll go ahead and stop. I just had a lot to say.

It’s good for a first draft. I think it could use some work, though. :p

There’s a lot in that post. I’m gonna focus on the “not enough small moments connecting the big, poignant moments for Carl” angle.

I think that there is a very good reason for this. Carl is in the midst of dealing with the loss of his wife. To do so, he is undertaking a gargantuan feat. Despite the fact that he looks quite non-chalant at times, he is putting forth a lot of effort to keep himself together. This becomes more visible as the journey becomes more difficult. By the time he is pulling his house towards the falls, he has a singular mindset that is interrupted by what he sees as pests. Pests who he decides to humor so that he can get done with his single-minded goal.

You see, the moments aren’t there because Carl ignores them. He ignores them until he can’t ignore them any more (the poignant ones). Or rather, to put it in another way, the moments are there, it’s just that we don’t see them as important because Carl doesn’t see them as important. He doesn’t acknowledge them. He’s single minded in his focus.

Take, for example, the fact that it was Russell who got them to S. America. Russell didn’t wake Carl up and say, “Hey, old man. You need to wake up so you can get me home.” Heck, Russell could have just steered them back to his house. But Russell took them to South freakin’ America, instead. Of course, this is partly because Russell really has no family back home (just like Carl). But it’s also because Russell is Assisting The Elderly.

That badge had a lot of symbolism. After all, isn’t that what a family is for? The elderly had, at one point, taken care of those who should be taking care of them. Instead, many go to the place that Carl was supposed to go to: the Retirement Home. Russell was taking care of Carl. Because Carl was Russell’s family.

But Carl ignores that moment. He doesn’t even acknowledge the sheer magnitude of what Russell did for him. That’s a moment that Carl ignores and therefore, we don’t see as an important or poignant moment.

Basically

It’s almost as though when he’s not confronted by a particularly trying situation, the emotional weight of the story is out of sight, out of mind for Carl.

Yes. Carl puts the emotional weight of the story out of mind. He has a singular purpose for much of his journey and nothing is going to get in his way. (Except meeting his idol. Which was tied back to his wife, so I can buy him taking the time to have dinner with him.)

What a wonderful film. I laughed (the talking dogs were really funny) and I cried. I was crying during the short too, though; breakups will do that to a person, and the sweet little story of loving the things you create and give even when they stick spines in your face, electrocute you, and headbutt you tugged at my heart quite a bit. Sometimes you need a helmet and shoulder pads to deal with what life gives you. I thought it was a perfect companion piece to the feature.

More on the feature later. I’m sleepy and it’s late.