3D lends Up’s imagery an entrancing vibrancy, providing even more visual depth to Pixar’s literally and figuratively deepest offering yet, a masterful tale of longing, regret, dreams and happiness wrapped up in a colorful, rollicking adventure-yarn package. Channeling Werner Herzog (specifically, The White Diamond) as well as his own prior, superlative Monsters, Inc., director Pete Docter’s film has a lightness befitting its central object – a house floating from urban development hell to South America via a bounty of brightly hued balloons – and a profundity at once subtle and piercing. Docter captures the exhilaration of exploration, the wonder of cinema and the thrill of young love in an immaculately realized opening, as young Carl Fredricksen, decked out in an aerial cap and goggles, stares in awe at newsreel footage of his adventurer hero Charles Muntz, and then during an imaginative stroll discovers a kindred spirit – and lifelong partner – in Ellie, whom the subsequent decades-spanning silent-film montage reveals as his beloved wife. It’s a wordless sequence that rivals any put to film this year (or in last year’s WALL-E), conveying an aesthetic nimbleness and richness of mature feeling – of the joy and pain of adulthood, specifically regarding the way life can unpredictably rebuff, and force us to reconfigure, our aspirations for the future – that’s simultaneously elating and heartbreaking.
It’s difficult to overstate Up’s magnificent blend of humor and pathos, a combination sewn tight by wide-ranging compassion – for the sorrow of loss, the excitement of traversing the unknown, the pleasure of camaraderie, and the freedom that comes from seizing the present rather than being tied down by the past. That last lesson is one learned by 78-year-old widower Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) only at the end of his saga, in which – after losing Ellie and about to lose his home to predatory real estate developers – he takes flight in his house to South America’s fictional Paradise Falls, where Muntz (Christopher Plummer) once famously travelled and where he and Ellie (as communicated by her mantelpiece painting) had always dreamed of residing. His journey, however, is not the solitary one he’d envisioned, as he’s unexpectedly joined by portly Wilderness Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai), a kid whose lust for the natural world and its myriad creatures and mysteries slowly strikes a chord with Carl. And once in Paradise Falls, the duo find further companions in the form of Dug (Bob Peterson), a pooch who can speak (and in different languages, to boot) thanks to a wondrous collar created by the now hermit-like Muntz, as well as a rare, fleet, ostrich-like bird that Muntz desperately wishes to catch.
Carl and his makeshift unit’s exploits include a series of increasingly loony chases topped off by an actual aerial dogfight, all orchestrated with a jaunty fluidity in tune with the sumptuous candy-colored visuals. Whereas centerpiece sequences provide the material with its requisite invigorating kick, panoramas of the house hovering above the clouds exude an almost spiritual grace, expressing the attainability of dreams with a deftness matched by the film’s later conception of the floating house, being dragged by crotchety Carl and enthusiastic Russell across the Paradise Falls ridgeline, as a manifestation of the burdensome past Carl must learn to release. That, to do so, Carl must first confront Muntz, the childhood idol-gone-mad who now seeks to destroy him, only further enriches this portrait of the essential and onerous weight of history, people’s continual process of self-definition (and –reinvention), and the vital necessity of family. Humorously and empathetically considerate of Carl’s bonds with Russell and Dug, unafraid to look tragedy in the face, and yet also brave enough to celebrate the hopeful promise that lurks around each new, unexplored corner, Up exudes a wit and wisdom that elevates it to the animated adventure apex.
