Movie Review: Up (2009, Directed by Pete Docter)

I am convinced that we are living in a golden age of animated cinema. Future film scholars will perhaps look back on the 21st century’s first decade and realize that the most important innovations in movie artistry came from the talented technicians at Pixar Studios. Don’t get me wrong, Pixar is capable of producing some mediocre films (see Cars, for example). However, last year’s WALL-E and the previous year’s Ratatouille had critics and general audiences alike talking about how animated film can be as thoughtful and humanistic as live-action film. This year’s Up follows in the path of these previous two successes and, in some ways, improves upon them.

If you’ve seen the trailer for Up, you know the basic premise of the new Pixar film. An elderly gentleman, voiced sensitively by Ed Asner, decides to leave his dreary and lonely life behind and embark on a new adventure, one that involves lifting his house via balloons to a land far, far away. He is accompanied by a young Boy Scout who is simultaneously annoying and irresistibly hilarious.

To boil this film down to that bare bones plot summary is to do it a great disservice. I was not prepared for what the movie’s first twenty minutes or so had to offer. We get the back story on how the elderly protagonist got to his current state of loneliness and general grumpiness. In the most artfully-composed montage I have seen in recent memory, we see the story of our grumpy old man and his beloved wife, starting with their first meeting as children and ending with the inevitable encroachment of death. In only ten minutes, we know more about their relationship and feel for them as characters more than we do for couples in every stupid romantic comedy combined. It is so refreshing to see an animated film that doesn’t insult our intelligence as viewers and provides exposition without coming right and telling us everything that is going on. The last film I saw that handled the protagonist’s background story with such deft technique was Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood. Significantly, both films give us important background information about the main character via the long lost art of silent montage. Perhaps there is hope for the future …

Unfortunately, the rest of Up can’t quite compare with these breathtaking opening moments. There are several significant plot holes and character development problems that took me out of the story. I don’t want to discuss these in detail because it may spoil a few plot developments that arise in the film’s final act. But, there are still many moments of profound insight and insurmountable joy in the latter half of the movie. I particularly loved the concept of dogs wearing collars programmed by their master to express the dog’s thoughts in “people speak.” Ultimately, I found the film’s resolution satisfying despite the misguided steps it takes along the way.

I find it interesting that both WALL-E and Up suffer from the same problem of starting with an incredibly engaging and innovative exposition but not following through with the storytelling devices necessary to keep the narrative flow going. It is my hope in the future that Pixar can create a film that finishes as robustly as it begins.

In the meantime, though, Up can be considered a paragon of excellence for the animated movie genre. Every frame reminds us, especially in the film’s first half, that we are watching human beings on the screen, not cartoon characters. Animation has come a long way from the early days of Steamboat Willy. Up is my favorite film of the year so far.