Up Reviewed on Blu-ray
By Bill Warren
Pixar is almost unnerving. They've been making features since 1995's "Toy Story," and every one of them, without exception has been very good. Several have been outstanding, among the best movies of the year, animated or otherwise. Their ease and proficiency are deeply impressive; their hundreds of employees work together fluidly, gradually coalescing the story and characters. When those are locked in, the work continues on the same level, and out pops another terrific movie.
Like "Up." This is somewhat more narrowly focused than most Pixar movies, with fewer central characters and a less busy storyline, with more emphasis on the characters it does have. Scenically, is grand stuff; the central image of a small Victorian-style house borne aloft by thousands of colorful balloons (10,286 balloons, says someone in a featurette), instantly became an icon, a representation of the unquenchable desire of mankind for both escape and homey comfort. It's simultaneously charming and awe-inspiring--and funny. So is the movie.
We first meet central character Carl Frederickson when he's a little boy, entranced by newsreels about intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, who tours the world in his own dirigible, the Spirit of Adventure, then disappears into South America, searching for an unusual, perhaps prehistoric, bird. Little Carl meets wildly enthusiastic Ellie, who wants to follow Muntz down there: "South America!" she exclaims. It's like America--but South!" She's very excited about going to Muntz's destination, the towering Paradise Falls, deep in Venezuela. Inevitably, Carl falls for Ellie, and in 15 of the best moments in all of movie history, we see their entire life together, from their wedding, to their lives as they age and learn they cannot have children (altogether a new idea for an animated film), age still more, gradually realize they will never take that adventuresome trip, and Ellie at last dies, leaving balloon-maker Carl (voice of Ed Asner) alone, a grumpy old man who needs a walker to get around. But he doesn't go far, usually, just out to his front porch where he grouses at the construction crews building high-rises all around his little house.
He's grumpy when Russell (Jordan Nagai), a Wilderness Explorer (read Boy Scout), shows up at his front door, eager to assist him in some way; Russell is determined to earn the merit badge he needs to fill out his sash--there's one space left, just over his heart. (Never pointed out, never emphasized; I wouldn't have noticed the placement except someone points it out in the useful, fascinating featurettes.) Carl is weary of everything, including the world, but somewhere inside him, a tiny spark of his own former enthusiasm, is rekindled. He gets rid of Russell--he thinks--by sending him on a snipe hunt.
Soon thereafter, though, Carl bids goodbye to the construction workers and whoosh, a huge cloud of balloons erupts from behind the house; their strings lead down through the chimney, and launches into the sky, intending to drift all the way to Paradise Falls and the tocui from which it plunges. (Tocui are very high plateaus in the Venezuela jungle.) But there's a knock on the door. Still hoping to assist Carl, Russell was crawling around under the house when it took off into the sky. And now Carl has an unwelcome passenger. Carl wanted to be alone in the house, alone with the knickknacks and keepsakes he and Ellie accumulated over their years, with her album of her hoped-for adventures an especially prized possession. Though the movie never points this out, it allows us to gradually realize that for Carl, the house IS Ellie.
They do drift to South America, and they do find Paradise Falls, way over on the other side of the strange-looking tocui the house is tethered to. So Carl and Russell begin towing the house across the plateau. They are surprised to encounter a cheerful, friendly--and talking--dog whose name, he happily tells them, is Dug (co-director Bob Peterson). "And I love you!" he adds, lapping at the annoyed Carl. They also encounter a tall, flightless, brightly-colored bird, like an unlikely cross between an ostrich and a macaw, whom Russell names Kevin (though they soon learn that Kevin is female).
But wait, there's more. A trio of other dogs, led by a domineering Doberman Pinscher called Alpha (also Peterson), is after them, and especially after Kevin. For the dogs, including Dug, belong to Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who lives--with his well-furnished dirigible--in a cave on the plateau. Though Carl is delighted at first to meet him, he and Russell soon learn that Muntz hopes to kill and stuff Kevin, taking the specimen back to New York, to reclaim his reputation as a great explorer.
The extras include a fascinating, even stunning, featurette: the main members of the "Up" production team actually went to Venezuela and ascended two of the remote tocuis. They're as strange and weirdly scenic up on top as in the movie; it looked wildly fanciful, but it turns out it's a realistic depiction of the way these things really look. The tocuis have long been regarded as lost worlds of a sort; in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle's famous and often-filmed "The Lost World," is set atop one of these tocuis. The one in "Up" looks very much like the primary plateau in the great silent film version of the Doyle novel. No dinosaurs, though, just Kevin, Kevin's chicks, Muntz's dogs, and sour old Muntz himself.
There are other featurettes as well; one is about the many outcomes for Muntz the production team considered; another, "Geriatric Hero," is how the story developed from a drawing of a grumpy old man holding dozens of gaily-colored balloons, into what it became, and the values of research--which the team did largely by meeting with their own grandparents, and by visiting a local retirement home. "Canine Companions" is about how they studied dogs (named in the end credits) to know how to animate their created counterparts. "Russell, Wilderness Explorer" amusingly reveals that Russell was largely based on Pixar storyboard artist Peter Sohn, who's Asian and egg-shaped, just like Russell. Other featurettes are about "Our Giant Flightless Friend, Kevin," "Homemakers of Pixar' (they made a model of Carl's house), "Balloons in Flight" (some of the team rode in a blimp; co-director Peter Docter rode in a privately-owned zeppelin, the lucky guy), and "Composing for Character," centering on Michael Giacchino, who wrote the unusually good, richly evocative score, which he largely derived from a single, melancholy piano chord.
This Blu-ray set features four discs. The first has the movie in Blu-ray high definition and a couple of extras; the next has the very interesting featurettes; the last two are the movie in digital form, allowing you to upload it directly to your computer, and a standard DVD. None of these, however, are in the superb 3D in which the film was shown in theaters. There are two shorts; the whimsical "Partly Cloudy" played with "Up" in most theaters, but "Dug's Special Mission" is new to the video release. There's a feature called "Cine-Explore," basically an illustrated commentary track.
Like all the Pixar movies, this is a great film for high definition, not just that amazing cloud of small balloons that lifts Carl's house--thank heaven for computer graphics. Imagine having to draw 10,000 individual balloons. The colors are rich, both in pastels and in more saturated, deeper colors, when Carl and Russell reach the Venezuelan plateau. Detail is sharp when necessary, but by now Pixar has learned how to diffuse their images, allowing scenes of mist, fog, and rain. The sound, too, is excellent, although atop the plateau, it's surprisingly quiet (as evidently it was in real life), no bird sounds except for Kevin's, just the constant wind. It's not an assaultive sound mix, not even when dogs in bi-planes strafe Carl's flying house. It's understated and realistic, and the movie is the better for it. Giacchino's score both creates emotions and underlines those inherent in the film; it's particularly good, romantic, wistful and charming, in the montage on the life of Carl and Ellie.
The characters, like the story, are simply but richly drawn. Carl seems at first to be a standard-issue grumpy old man, but he's more than that; it isn't just that he once had dreams of adventuring with his wife, it's that he is, even in his 70s, still something of an adventurer, only he just forgot that for a while. He gradually learns that he doesn't need the house to remember Ellie; she always lives in his heart and memories. Russell, at first, seems to be just an enthusiastic kid, but when he talks about his beloved dad, about whom he never says a single critical word, we realize he no longer lives with his father, who has remarried. Carl fills a void in Russell's heart, one he didn't even know he had.
The more movies Pixar makes, the more sophisticated their animation becomes. It's reaching some kind of pinnacle now; it's hard to imagine how they will progress from here--but it will be upward.
Actors, etc. Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Pete Docter, Jordan Nagai, Pixar
