Pixar's New Animated Film - Up - Lovely and Poig
Pixar continues its box office dominance
Jun 6, 2009
Quotes like "hilarious" and "a great family film" are still being bandied about in reviews of Pixar's Up, after its stellar box office performance on its first weekend. These quotes are accurate, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Up is, indeed, a great family film, but it’s more than that.
More Than Just a Family Film
Thematically, Up is about loss—about how to move on from it and how to heal. The main protagonist, Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner), has suffered great loss in his life and is about to lose more. He decides to pursue his longtime dream of visiting Paradise Falls in South America. Toward that end, he sets his house afloat with a massive collection of balloons. Stowing away on his porch is Russell (Jordan Nagai), who’s trying to earn his Wilderness Explorer badge for Assisting the Elderly—the last badge he needs to collect to fill his sash.
From there, the movie veers into action/adventure, but with poignant, almost painful elements driving the story. From personal loss, the theme shifts into loss of dreams—and how sometimes you might think you’ve lost a dream when really the dream has just changed into something just as important and just as valuable as what you thought the dream was in the beginning. It’s this realization that finally brings Carl some closure, and brings him and Russell together to fill empty spaces in each other’s lives.
3D Animation at its Best
The animation in Up is flawless, and the Disney Digital 3D presentation adds to the enjoyment without ever resorting to gimmickry as many 3D movies tend to do. 3D in the movies seems finally to have matured, becoming more about enhancing a great story and less about making the audience flinch when things fly out at them. The story and emotion in this movie is easily strong enough to stand without the 3D, but the 3D elements bring it into a closer, more personal relationship with the audience.
The deep, genuine emotion evoked by this movie goes far beyond the usual fare labeled as appropriate for the whole family. And the adventure sections carry undertones that the youngest set won’t get. Still, it offers plenty of laughs along with the poignant sequences, and action/adventure that the kids will get, carrying a message that will strike a chord with the grown-ups in the audience.
Overall, Up is a great family movie, in the sense that it has elements to entertain a wide range of moviegoers. Parents should take the PG rating seriously, though—some action sequences are quite scary, while some are, as mentioned previously, very emotionally intense.
