CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Up

Sunday, July 05, 2009

this entry brought to you by thom yorke, "black swan"





I have a friend who had told me she was hesitant to take her kids to see Up because a friend of hers had taken her children and said it was "too sad". To each their own, I suppose, but I couldn't help but say out loud that clearly her friend is a complete idiot.

It's not that Up has no sad moments, because it does. In fact, the opening few minutes is a whirlwind of emotions, as a wide-eyed young Carl Fredricksen (voiced absolutely perfectly by Ed Asner-- you can't teach other animation studios how to make their movies as perfect as Pixar does, but if it's one thing tangible they could take away from their films, it's to not cast hot actors that add nothing to the animated roles they're in, but to cast people that more fully embody the character itself) meets the love of his life and, as he grows older, falls in love with and marries her. They promise each other when they're young that they'll someday have an adventure, but as real life continues to intervene, they never get around to it. Now Fredricksen is an codgy old man and his wife has passed on, and he decides to go on that adventure they'd always planned. All of this is told in just a few minutes, yet Pixar puts an entire range of emotions perfectly into it without resorting to cheap tricks such as relying too much on sappy music. If by "sad" this friend of a friend meant "filled with real, human emotions to be swept into", well, she's right.

But while the theme of the movie is about a grumpy old man learning to let go of the past and instead live in the present and to appreciate the things around his (which is sort of the opposite of "sad" and kind of the definition of "inspiring", but whatever), the plot isn't sad at all, and in fact could be best be summed up as "imaginative". Pixar movies are always full of imagination, but this one especially so. Fredricksen's plan to get away from it all is to tie thousands of balloons to his house and merely float away. That's imaginative in and of itself. But once Fredricksen lands on a tropical paradise and has a giant bird following him around, he encounters an army of talking dogs, able to do so from a mechanism in their collar. If the trailers hadn't featured Dug the dog, I actually wouldn't mention the dogs here in the review at all because they are so incredibly hilarious and full of personality to even admit that they're there gives a little bit of it away. The dialog of the dogs is so clever and so spot-on that whoever wrote it should get a raise. That there would be a huge and delightful chase at some point in the movie is a bit of a given, isn't it?

And there is, of course, the fact that this is Pixar's first 3D movie, and, in my case, the first time I saw a full-length feature film in 3D (I saw a 50 minute documentary called Dolphins and Whales at the zoo first), and I'm of two minds. For one thing, I was expecting a lot of whiz-bang 3D effects that were in your face, and Up never had any. On the one hand, this means that there's never a moment where you're jolted to the back of your seat gushing "Wow!". But on the other hand, the 3D never felt like a novelty, and for that, I definitely appreciated it. In fact, more than things popping out at you (although the balloons do, and it looks great), there is an amazing amount of depth into the screen, giving an excellent field of view throughout jungle-like backdrops of most of the movie.

Up is an achievement in movie-making, and while it isn't quite Wall-E good, it's easily as good as Finding Nemo, one of Pixar's greatest films. It's a classic movie, and with the Academy's decision to lengthen its Best Picture nomination list to ten, it's a shoe-in at the end of the year.
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with love from CRS @ 11:40 AM 

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