Yet, happily, Up has plenty more surprises in its locker. It’s a perfect piece of simple story-telling so lucid and moving that if you left the movie at that point, you’d feel thoroughly satisfied that you’d got your money’s worth. As the couple’s dreams of adventures in far-flung places get parlayed into the reality of everyday life, Docter and Peterson provide snapshots of married life, a kind of Revolutionary Road without the harsh shouting, that movingly document the tiny triumphs (turning a rundown house into a Technicolor dream home) and crushing catastrophes (Ellie’s sad discovery at the hospital) that constitute a life. On the way home, Carl hooks up with fellow Muntz fan and wannabe adventurer Ellie (who looks like the kid sister of The Incredibles’ Helen Parr), and what follows is the most beautifully wrought, poetic love story of the year. It’s a lovely gracenote that acknowledges the importance of dreaming (and day-dreaming) within everyday life without once pouring on any sentimental, saccharine claptrap. As Carl leaves the movie theatre, he imagines the newsreel narrator describing his journey home as a grand adventure, his imagination turning stepping over the cracks in the pavement into jumping over the widest ravines. Carl Fredricksen, his eyes wide beneath aviator goggles, sits glued to the exploits of intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, detailed in a lovingly mounted mock-’30s newsreel, mouthing along with Muntz’s catchphrase, “Adventure is out there!” This ’30s milieu looms large: the entire film is fuelled by that decade’s spirit of derring-do, the thrill of hero worship and the sense of the world as a huge playground waiting to be explored. It’s this that gives the U-rated thrills huge emotional heft.Īs well as Fitzcarraldo, Up also shares trace elements with Chaplin, The Station Agent, The Wizard Of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, About Schmidt, Gran Torino and Hitchcock, so given its affectionate melting pot of filmic influences, it is perhaps apt that the movie starts with a little boy sat enraptured by the flickering images on a cinema screen. ![]() In Up’s case, the hero, Carl Fredricksen, is literally tethered to his house, dragging it across exotic South American landscapes, but in reality he’s tied to his memories of a previous life. Up also reveals an interesting retro reading on Pixar’s previous heroes, recasting the leads as figures stuck in a rut and looking for a way out of their status quo: the factory-working drones of Monsters, Inc., oppressed by the need to garner children’s screams the obsolete superheroes of The Incredibles marooned in suburban mediocrity the sewer-dwelling rat who dreams of a five-star kitchen in Ratatouille WALL-E’s trash-compacting robot who yearns for life (and love) beyond the garbage. It’s a love story where the love transcends death. It’s a buddy movie where the buddies are separated by 70 years. It’s a character study of a cantankerous old git. Here, the treatment and imagery is even more bizarre. For all of WALL-E’s wordless abstraction, it still had sci-fi trappings, whizz-bang spaceships and cute robotic sidekicks. ![]() Even by its own standards, Up stretches the limits of what stories are permissible in mainstream animation. If the traditional view of animation is that it is kiddie-aimed fare with a dose of adult slyness smuggled inbetween the primary colours and thrills and spills, Pixar appears to work on opposite principles. ![]() A bird called Kevin would have done wonders for Fitzcarraldo’s box office. Unlike Fitzcarraldo, Up will break your heart in the first five minutes, boasts scene-stealing dogs with high-pitched voices and stars a rare exotic bird called Kevin. Like Fitzcarraldo, Up, Pixar’s tenth feature-length slice of genius, is driven by a tenacious lead character dragging his home across the jungle, a real cinematic width and a sense of wonder at both nature and the burden of dreams. An epic, visionary, never-to-be-repeated slice-of-life action movie, it is also an unlikely touchstone for an animated summer entertainment, the likes of which are usually powered by focus groups and the need to tie in Happy Meals. In 1982, Werner Herzog made Fitzcarraldo, the story of an over-zealous Irishman (bonkers Klaus Kinski) who, in his quest to bring opera to the South American jungle, drags a huge steamer up and over a mountain.
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