Cast (voices): Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer

Director: Pete Docter

Screenplay: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson

Running time: 1 hr 39 mins

Genre: Animation



CRITIQUE:


For having opened the Cannes Film Festival this year, there’s something exceptionally rare about Pixar’s tenth feature-length film Up. Not every year the French cineaste considers a Hollywood commercial feature to premiere at the melting-pot of high-minded cinema, let alone an animated film, the very first in the festival circuit’s history to do so. But Pixar earns its kudos. For throughout the years, the studio has ostensibly graduated from a children’s playground to move into the sophisticated world of animation. Clearly, from the company that brought us cutesy toys, furry monsters, clownfishes and rodents for central characters, it doesn’t take a leap of genius to recognise that they have grown up and has ventured into a more adult-oriented territory. WALL•E was Pixar’s first audacious step – a tale of a solitary robot in a dystopian, nihilist landscape is something that would skirt around a child’s mindset. Now, with more derring-do, Pixar has conceived Up – featuring a lonesome, silver-haired curmudgeon as its protagonist. That alone rarely happens to a studio built around the flights and fancy of the fantastical.


This unlikely hero, retired balloon vendor Carl Fredricksen, is bordering senility and dementia, and literally marooned in his Smarties-factory-coloured house amid a rapidly shifting, steel-and-concrete modernity. At first, he may appear to his neighbours as a miserable old git, but when he later pumps a gobsmacking horde of balloons through his chimney, with an inspired flourish, we’re rooting for this old fella. It’s one of the most magical, awe-inspiring sights you’ll ever see in cinema, one that complements nicely with Albert Lamorisse’s iconic French short The Red Balloon. This is Carl’s stamp of rebellion and call for adventure to Paradise Falls in South America, a dream of a haven that has been tucked away for a lifetime.


As it is a film about following dreams and fulfilling a life’s promise of adventure (this is Pixar’s motto), it’s easily forgiven then that Pete Docter, who understands depth from folly in his Monster’s Inc., decides to appeal to the studio’s commercial nature by bringing out a bonkers prehistoric bird named Kevin, a cross between Road Runner and a loveable parrot, and a pack of collared talking dogs who all try to be funny and ends up rather annoying, like bad thugs employed to fill the screen. It borders the ridiculous and the whimsical, but Pixar has to have something to keep the tots cheerful. Thanks then to a plucky, persistent sidekick Russell, an eager-beaver Boy Scout that boasts more badges than a decorated general. His awkward relationship with the pensioner protagonist starts from wacky to silly and to the downright touching portrait of friendship that transcends years and generations. His quiet confession in a campfire about his absentee father, with Carl’s transformation of paternal affections, is lovingly portrayed. Sentimental but never mawkish. Hence this picture also transforms into a crowd-pleasing buddy movie that’s worthy of a Butch Cassidy and a Sundance Kid, but with zeppelins and airborne combat.


But beneath Up’s colourful palette, masterful animated tricks of whizzbangs and show-stopping sequences in pursuit of Paradise Falls, there lies a beautifully told, bittersweet tale of melancholy, real-life sadness and the inevitable truth of losing a loved one. It’s not a surprise then that the most poignant moments are the ones with the sparsest of dialogues. There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned in the film’s almost-wordless prologue, squeezing decades of life memoir in a five-minute montage, harking back to the silent eras, also masterfully evoked through last year’s WALL•E. It’s an opener that would instantly shatter hearts. Essentially, at its core, Up is a love story that surpasses mortality. Carl’s deceased wife Ellie is the driving force of the adventure, and every single shot of an empty chair, a vacant table and a forlorn house in a distant, floating in the sky, Ellie is omnipresent to Carl’s existence. When Carl discovers Ellie’s adventure book, it’s an ultimately moving epiphany of a life well lived, of somebody who learned to appreciate the real pleasures of life over romantic desires. We also learn to admire Carl’s unswerving tenacity by tethering his floating house on his back, like an Atlas-figure burdened with the world, but also metaphorically alludes to a man who cannot let go of his memories. And Pixar invests so much in the central character that when we witness Carl somnolently gazing at his house being enveloped in the clouds, for a sheer rapturous minute, we somehow glimpse into a man who learns the art of letting go.


VERDICT:

Pixar's storytelling panache is to die for. Some minor weaknesses aside, of the commercial-appealing nature, Up’s storybook simplicity underpins a profound, slice of life tale, balancing reality with the triumph of imagination, and the melancholy with the zeal for adventure. It’s a beautifully moving tribute to anyone who has never given up on something. Awe-inspiring and literally Up-lifting.




RATING: A