"Man plans, God laughs" - Yiddish proverb
"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans" - John Lennon
"There's no place like home" -- Dorothy Gale
For older generations, the American dream was to get married, raise a family, retire from one career-spanning job with good benefits, and grow old together in one's house. But sometimes life has a way of altering such plans to one degree or another. And that often ultimately results in a husband or wife left alone in old age, with others trying to persuade or even force them to leave their beloved home and its bevy of memories.
Facing the loss of his, 78-year-old widower Carl Fredricksen takes a drastic measure. Having worked with balloons his entire life, he employs a large number of them and both figuratively and literally lifts off for a new chapter of his life in "Up," yet another terrific computer-animated offering from the folks at Pixar.
Marking their tenth feature film and their first in 3-D (in select theaters), the pic again proves that the talent in that studio is nearly unmatched in terms of creative and completely engaging cinematic storytelling. And this delightful, touching, funny and adventurous flick should appeal to all age demographics, what with its main character being a septuagenarian and his counterpart an 8-old-kid, and the story including issues relevant to them and their respective places in life.
While there will likely be debate regarding where the pic falls in line alongside the other Pixar films (such as "Wall-E," "Ratatouille," "Finding Nemo" and "Toy Story 2"), that exercise ends up the equivalent of trying to order the quality of any other set of perfect to near perfect masterpieces. In any event, it's easily the best animated film of the year and should end up in the top lists for overall movies.
Like its immediate predecessor (that featured that lovable, Chaplinesque robot), some of the best moments here come in those that are free of any dialogue. After an introductory, old-timey newsreel sequence establishes the adventure that's yet to come, the main character and his wife-to-be meet as kids.
That's followed by an absolutely incredible, multi-minute montage of them living and growing old together, facing the usual array of expected and unexpected developments that life throws one's way, especially in terms of scuttling dreams or at least just putting them on the back burner.
That sequence also serves to humanize and endear us to the protagonist who otherwise would have simply arrived in the story in full curmudgeon, if still lovable mode, thus adding an extra layer of depth to the character and overall proceedings. It also sets up one of many familiar archetypes with which the film satisfactorily modifies for its own purposes.
And that would be the odd couple pairing and specifically the old man and young kid combo. That's been done before countless times, but writer/director Bob Peterson and co-director Pete Docter manage to infuse new, amusing and emotionally relevant life into what could have easily been nothing but recycled stereotypes.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai nail their vocal delivery or that the animators -- while purposefully avoiding any attempt at photorealism -- perfectly recreate body movements to represent the characters' ages and various little facial expressions that prove the old adage about pictures and a thousand words.
Ignoring the old W.C. Fields advice about working with kids and animals, the filmmakers not only pair their curmudgeon with that 8-year-old boy, but also a squawking prehistoric bird and a number of talking dogs. While the latter similarly isn't anything new (especially in the field of animated films), the fun twist is that they're speaking "dog" as translated into human English by technology advanced collars. The effect ranges from amusing to hilarious and surprisingly (and thankfully) never grows old.
Then there's the loving homage to films of old, such as the sort of serial cliffhangers that influenced Spielberg and Lucas into making "Raiders of the Lost Ark," with the twist being the inclusion of the ubiquitous floating house in many of those scenes. Speaking of the latter, that obviously brings up memories of "The Wizard of Oz," not only in terms of the lift-off of one's abode leading to great and imaginative adventure, but also the thematic elements of whether a house is a home and that there's no place like the latter.
Throw in various other jokes large and small that some viewers will get and others might not, a surprising amount of compassion and emotionally thematic material (even for a Pixar offering), and equal amounts of comedy and adventure, and you end up with a highly enjoyable, thoroughly entertaining and even -- yes, you guessed it -- uplifting picture. While it might lose a little momentum from time to time and perhaps occasionally get a bit too goofy or focus too much on the action and adventure in the third act, I found "Up" to be a completely satisfying experience. It rates as a 7.5 out of 10.
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