Thinking about Up

I have been (as the title says) thinking about Disney-Pixar’s Up.

First off, as I said in my Tweet last evening, this movie is gorgeous. It’s probably the best — the most realistic — animation that Pixar has ever done, while remaining cartoony enough to avoid the Uncanny Valley effect (though the lack of nostrils is disturbing). All the details are lovingly crafted, visible not just in the big things, but in the small — the steadily changing status of the balloons over the house, for example, not to mention the way they behave.

It’s also an intensely and realistically human film. The prolog would suit as a (dark) film all on its own, and the fall and eventual rise of Carl Fredricksen (in humanity and life, as well as in attitude and altitude) is deeply moving, perhaps all the more so because you’re expecting it all to be a “kid’s show.” I was reminded over and over again of some of the darker, more conflicted moments of Finding Nemo and Incredibles, but Up is like this almost all the time, as we watch a man driven by tragedy and a lifetime thought wasted act in ways both heroic and petty.

In some ways, that points out the biggest flaw to the film, where its very grounded nature interacts with whimsy and some clumsy plot directions with results that might be forgiven elsewhere, but here jar all the more.

(Spoilers below …) 

I’m not talking here about the initial conceit — sending a house off into the air with twenty-odd thousand helium balloons. In some fashion, like with The Wizard of Oz (which this film resembles in many ways), I’m willing to overlook that. But some other items stretched the bounds of suspended disbelief.

• Balloons carrying a house into the air? Okay. Single thunder-storm driving that balloon house down to the Andes? And right to where Carl wanted to go (pretty much)? Um … not so much.
• I enjoyed the dogs. Having the dogs be preternaturally smart just didn’t make sense (are all dogs in this world smart? did Muntz do something to evolve their intelligence?)
• Muntz is at least 20 years older than Fredricksen (probably more), a dashing and renowned adventurer when Carl and Ellie are 9 or 10. Yet the two men come across — as old men — as roughly the same age.
• Carl, the old man who can barely get out of bed, pulls a house (which is, we’ll argue, weightless at best, but certainly has all of its inertia) for many miles over and through rough terrain.
• In a world so realistic (and gorgeously so), the highly intelligent and highly dextrous “snipe” feels terribly cartoony. As do the (very cute, very fun) doggy fighter planes.

(By the way, it’s nice to see a young Disney protagonist who hasn’t lost his mother. Though Russell’s mother is largely absent from the film, his father is also largely out of the picture, and Carl has lost his wife, so I guess that makes up for it.)

It’s not that these things aren’t reasonable in the context of a Disney oor Pixar film. But the the base backstory, and character of Carl Fredricksen (and Russell, for that matter), feel so real, that the unreal elements were hard for me to cognitively work around. It would be like dancing chipmunks appearing in the middle of a Battlestar Galactica episode — jarring and difficult to reconcile with what else is going on.

I said last night that this was the Pixar film I was least likely to watch again, and I stand by that. It’s an awfully bittersweet film at best, and the while the message at the end is that Carl has actually had, net, a wonderful life, with the prospect of still more adventure, I, like Carl, am still dwelling on the losses he’s faced, and the sense of dreams unfulfilled and lost. Perhaps that’s my middle age talking and my own existential angst over what in my life is slipping away, what dreams deferred will remain that way, even the frosty touch of mortality. Or maybe the Pixar crew did too good a job of setting up that initial grimness to Carl’s post-Ellie existence. 

Whatever the case, this isn’t a film I’m likely to just grab on a lark and throw into the DVD player. Like many great and moving films I’ve been privileged to see, it will be a while before I can gird myself to again watch Carl’s pain, even if I know it will be relieved in the end.