The film begins in a movie theater in the 1930s with a wide-eyed young boy named Carl (Jeremy Leary), who dreams of a future life of adventure, avidly watching a newsreel about the famed explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who claims to have discovered a giant bird in a remote region of South America called Paradise Falls, but is ultimately labeled a fraud. Carl then meets a little girl named Ellie (Elie Docter), who is every bit the imaginative dreamer that he is, and it’s a match made in heaven. Then, in what is the first of the film’s many magical turns of heart, we are given a beautiful montage of Carl and Ellie’s life together that is punctuated with moments of such happiness and sadness that you feel like you’ve watched an entire movie by the time it ends with an image of Carl, now a square-jawed old man, sitting alone in the funeral parlor having just lost the love of his life.

This, essentially, is where the story proper picks up, with Carl (now voiced with the recognizable gravelly hrumph of Ed Asner) living alone in his and Ellie’s storybook house, which is now isolated amidst the shadows of a massive construction development. After an unfortunate turn of events results in his being forced to move to a retirement home, Carl makes good on his ages-old, cross-my-heart promise to Ellie that they would one day move to Paradise Falls by lashing thousands of helium balloons to his house and floating away into the sky. It’s a moment of great, profound absurdity that in a lesser movie might be the climax, but here is just the start of increasingly more wonderful things to come.

As it turns out, Carl is not alone. Trapped on his front porch at the time of lift-off is Russell (Jordan Nagai), a pleasantly plump little boy who needs only one more patch (for helping the elderly) to complete his Wilderness Explorer merit badge. Thus, we have one of the oldest matches in the book--the grumpy old man and the earnest, innocent boy who represents what he once was--but director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and screenwriter/codirector Bob Peterson (Finding Nemo) make it feel entirely new and infinitely moving by rooting it in a story that is as random and fantastical as the balloons carrying Carl’s house are brilliantly multicolored. There is a certain comfortable predictability to the film’s emotional arc, but I defy anyone who hasn’t read a detailed plot synopsis to predict where the narrative is headed.

Without giving too much away, I will say that the house does land successfully in South America, where Carl and Russell are entangled in a wild adventure involving a giant, squawking, brightly colored bird that Russell names Kevin, a former hero who becomes an evil nemesis, and a pack of dogs who are equipped with special collars that turn their thoughts into spoken words. Anyone who has ever had a dog will find infinite pleasures in the film’s spot-on approximations of what might be going through a lovable, slobbery dog’s mind at any given moment. Peterson lends his own voice to Dug, the odd-dog-out in the pack who immediately adopts Carl as his new “master” and endures all manner of hardship (including the dreaded “Cone of Shame,” surely the funniest thing in the film) before emerging as his own kind of hero at the end. Along the way Up has much to say about the reality of deferred dreams and the importance of finding life’s adventures right under your own nose, but it touches on these issues with such gentleness and sincerity that it never feels preachy, which is usually the main tripping point in such films.

Yet, to describes the many pleasures afforded by Up is ultimately an exercise in futility because the film works you over in so many ways, pulling you from moments of great tenderness, to solid belly laughs, to vertiginous cliffhanger thrills, to images that make you wonder what, exactly, they are smoking over at Pixar Studios and why more filmmakers aren’t smoking the same thing. Up’s visual scope is its own constant marvel, giving us generous helpings of imaginative wonder sprinkled with familiar bits of the pop-culture past (the opening newsreel is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, and Paradise Falls’ odd formation is taken almost directly from the 1925 silent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World). The filmmakers also make gorgeous use of the increasingly sophisticated art of computer-generated animation, which allows for that weird, wonderful mixture of the cartoonish and the photorealistic to draw you into the depths of the film’s fervid imagination. It’s a place you won’t want to leave.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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