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Dusty: [after giving a bad movie review] That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most.
Rating: PG
Director: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson
Writers: Bob Peterson, Pete Docter, Tom McCarthy
Stars: Edward Asner, Joran Nagai, John Ratzenberger
Release Date: May 29, 2009
Run time: 1 hour, 36 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki
Young Carl Fredricksen idolizes famed explorer Charles Muntz, who is discredited when a giant bird skeleton he brought back from Paradise Falls in South America is deemed fake. Muntz travels back to the falls, vowing not to return until he brings back a live specimen.
Carl befriends Ellie, another young Muntz fan, who keeps a scrapbook of her adventures and dreams of moving her “clubhouse” (an abandoned house) to Paradise Falls and having adventures of her own. Carl and Ellie eventually marry, renovate the clubhouse and move in, working at the city zoo as a balloon salesman and zookeeper, respectively. Ellie suffers a miscarriage,[5] and they learn they cannot have children. The couple saves money for a trip to Paradise Falls, but are repeatedly forced to spend their savings on more pressing needs. Many years later, a now elderly Carl decides to surprise Ellie with tickets to South America, but she falls ill and is hospitalized, giving Carl her scrapbook before she dies.
Now in his late 70s,[6] Carl holds out while the neighborhood around him is redeveloped. After unintentionally injuring a construction worker who accidentally damaged his mailbox, Carl is ordered by a court to move into an assisted living facility. However, Carl resolves to keep his promise to Ellie to move their house to Paradise Falls and attaches numerous balloons to it in order to fly there. Russell, a young “Wilderness Explorer” scout attempting to earn his final merit badge for assisting the elderly, becomes an accidental stowaway. Before Carl can land and send Russell home, a storm propels the house all the way to South America.
The house lands on a tepui opposite Paradise Falls. Carl and Russell harness themselves to the still-buoyant house and tow it across the mesa. Along the way, they encounter a giant flightless bird that Russell names Kevin (though the bird is later revealed to be female) and Dug, a Golden Retriever whose collar has a device that translates his thoughts into human speech. After failed attempts to evade the animals, Carl reluctantly allows both to join the party.
Dug’s pack, all wearing collar translators, surrounds them. The dogs’ master is revealed to be an elderly Charles Muntz, who invites Carl and Russell aboard his airship and discusses his quest to capture the bird. However, Carl’s initial excitement over meeting him fades as he realizes that Muntz’s obsession has driven him insane. After Muntz shows them the bird skeleton, Russell notes its resemblance to Kevin. Becoming hostile, Muntz reveals that he has murdered other travelers he suspected of also seeking the bird. Carl, Russell and Dug flee, pursued by Muntz’s dogs; they are rescued by Kevin, who gets injured in the process.
Hearing Kevin call out to her chicks, Carl agrees to take her home. However, Muntz captures her and starts a fire beneath Carl’s home. Forced to choose, Carl saves his home, allowing Muntz to take Kevin away and losing Russell’s respect. Disheartened, Carl looks through his wife’s scrapbook and discovers that she had filled in blank pages with photos of their life together and written “Thanks for the adventure – now go have a new one!”. Reinvigorated, he goes outside, only to see Russell flying after Kevin using balloons and a leaf blower. Carl lightens his house by emptying it completely, enabling it to fly again.
Russell arrives at Muntz’s airship but is caught. Carl and Dug, the latter of whom stowed away, board the dirigible and free him and Kevin. Muntz pursues them and traps Russell, Kevin, and Dug inside the house, but Carl saves them just as the tether breaks. Muntz leaps after them, but gets his leg tangled in balloon strings and falls to his death. Carl’s house, having lost several balloons, descends out of sight beneath the clouds.
Carl, Dug, and Russell reunite Kevin with her chicks before returning home to the United States in Muntz’s airship. Russell receives his badge for assisting the elderly, and Carl presents Russell with a bottle cap Ellie gave Carl when they first met as kids years ago, which he dubs “The Ellie Badge”. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Carl, his house has landed on the cliff overlooking Paradise Falls, fulfilling his promise to Ellie.
MY REVIEW:
I recently had the opportunity to watch Pixar’s Up for the first time. By reputation, this film was ostensibly a kid’s film, but grief-filled and heartbreaking for its first ten or so minutes, then hilarious for the rest of its runtime. Those were my expectations going in. I do not know that I entirely agree. For me, the poignant first ten minutes never entirely lifted. There were a lot of funny moments when the action got going, but they were funny in the way an unexpected burst of laugh feels when you’ve been weeping. In some ways, the laughter feels larger and stronger than it otherwise would, because your spirit had been weighed down, but the move never entire takes the weight from its audience. All of that said, I do stand in agreement with nearly every review I read after I finished my own viewing: Up is a masterpiece.
The writers delivered a story about profound grief, loss, and regret and they put that story idea squarely in an entirely plausible scenario, namely one where an old man, after a long life and decades of marriage, loses his wife. Then the story sets out to explain how he grieves and moves forward in spite of that, with an incredible sensitivity for children to watch, understand what is happening, learn from it, and ultimately enjoy the story. I’m honestly pretty astonished by the quality of this writing. It’s that good.
The movie begins by giving us a quick montage of the life Carl and Ellie shared together, starting in childhood, before letting us see her pass away in old age. We see their ups and downs, their adventures, and disappointments. When it’s all over, though, even as a viewer, you are left with a feeling that when Ellie died so did Carl – except that he was still there. She was his entire life and she was gone. This was accomplished in just over ten minutes and to start the movie – one I might remind you is aimed at children.
The film then is a study in grief. The famous “five stages of grief” include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We see a little bit of all of that with Carl. He continues to talk to her as though she’s not gone. He’s angry – so much so that he strikes someone for messing with the mailbox he and Ellie had shared together. (This incident led to his being notified that he will be forcibly sent to live in a senior assisted living center.) We see something of the bargaining phase in his effort to literally fly his house to a place he and Ellie had always talked about visiting – Paradise Falls. Carl acts as if getting their house there will fix things. Despite his best efforts – and they are incredible – Carl ultimately fails and he ends up depressed and alone. The moment of acceptance comes later when he sees a note from the late Ellie thanking him for their adventures together and hoping for him to have more. This seems to give Carl peace with his past such that he can accept it and let the weight of his grief go. To make that point crystal clear, he quite literally leaves the home which almost but didn’t quite make it to Paradise Falls, along with their shared stuff inside, to go on a new adventure – one that leads him to help Russell, the young kid who recently wandered into his life and clearly needs *someone.* Carl decides to be that someone.
Honestly it’s hard to even write about this movie.
There are a lot of laughs here, too. An old man using thousands of helium balloons to successfully fly his house away is funny in and of itself, but we also get a precocious kid who unexpectedly tags along, a gigantic goofy bird who loves chocolate bars, and a bunch of dogs with collars that give them funny sounding voices. The running gag about “squirrel” (wherein all the dogs in the scene stop and stare intently at something off screen for a few seconds) was particularly effective. The movie is funny. Those laughs work like helium balloons to lift its audience through and eventually above the weight this story places on it. In that sense, the comedy mostly works. Maybe more importantly, I think the levity is all done well enough, sensitively enough, and at the right times, to help a younger viewer cope with a weighty and emotional story that intends to teach him or her about a difficult but inevitable pain we all eventually face. And this is all done while being entertaining.
The late Hollywood icon Ed Asner lends his voice to the widower, Carl Fredricksen, and he does so with a perfect blend of usual gruffness and occasional tenderness. It’s one of the best acting performances I’ve ever seen in an animated movie. (He made me feel my feelings.)
If you haven’t seen Up, I definitely recommend it. It’s film art at its best. It runs you through a gamut of emotions, it makes you think deeply, and it’s more or less family friendly for nearly all ages (it might be just a little too intense for very young potential audience members – hence the PG rating.) However, if you do watch it, I recommend bringing along a box of tissues. Or you might want to watch alone if you’re someone who is prone to what some might call “ugly crying.” Either way, I recommend the film.