Up
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It started with a cartoon drawing: a cluster of gaily colored party balloons held by a cranky old man, his eyes asquint, as if daring any kid to take one. Pete Docter's sketch, made back in '04, suggested another droll innovation at Pixar, a studio proud of taking risks in a traditional genre; mean and old are words rarely attached to the main character in an animated feature. But Docter, 40, who'd done the 2001 Monsters, Inc., and his co-director and co-writer Bob Peterson didn't want just to have fun with the elderly gent. They would send him and the audience on a journey in two new directions: penetratingly inward and exaltedly up.
Those, you might say, were the compass points of last summer's Pixar wonder WALL•E, of which Docter was the original director (before handing the project to Andrew Stanton). There are other similarities between that futurist galactic epic and Up, which arrives in North American theaters Friday after its rapturous reception two weeks ago as the opening-night attraction at the Cannes Film Festival. Both movies are about lonely creatures--a droid left on Earth, a man whose cherished wife has died--taking a perilous trip. Both protagonists are stout and box-shaped and don't talk much. Both films, under the thrill-ride wrapping, are unabashed love stories. And though it's not yet summer, we can declare that Up, like WALL•E, will prove to be one of the most satisfying movie experiences of its year.
Floating Away
Spanning two continents and seven decades, Up begins in a 1930s movie theater. A newsreel tells us that famous explorer Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer) is just back from South America's remote Paradise Falls with the bones of a prehistoric bird. Denounced as a fraud by archaeologists, Muntz vows to retrieve a member of the species and bring it back alive. In the audience, wearing aviator goggles atop his thick-rimmed specs, is young Carl Fredricksen, who is enthralled by Muntz's motto, "There's adventure out there!"
On the way home, Carl finds a kindred spirit: a girl named Ellie (voiced by Docter's young daughter Elie), as vivacious as he is stolid, who harbors the same dream of visiting Paradise Falls. It's love at first sight, and in a tender montage, Up shows us their life together: the wedding, the fixing up of their home, the quiet walks, their respective jobs at the local zoo (she tending the animals, he selling balloons), their eager preparations for a child they later learn they can't have, their need to defer the big trip to pay for home improvements, then her slowing pace and death. This series of vignettes is played without dialogue and underscored by Michael Giacchino's wistful waltz. It's the sweetest, saddest 4½ minutes you'll ever see on film.
With the love of his life gone, widower Carl (Ed Asner) might as well be dead. His grief has soured into guilt, which he walls up in a castle of cantankerousness. His day is a dull routine of dressing, hobbling with his cane to sit on the front porch and keeping his home just as it was when Ellie was there. It's really a mausoleum, and he is both caretaker and corpse. We never heard Carl say a word to Ellie while she was alive, but now he talks nonstop to his absent darling. She'd understand his bitterness; she might even forgive it.