some thoughts on "Up"
One: I loved it. I laughed, I cried.
Two: Talking dogs who fly little fighter airplanes? There’s Dreamworks for that. This strikes me as the kind of thing that Pixar usually avoids: in Pixar’s worlds, animals (and toys) usually can talk to each other but not to human beings. Think about how Remy in Ratatouille chatters away to other rats but responds to Linguini with a rather full repertoire of Gallic gestures. By following this rule most of the time the filmmakers are able to get maximum effect from breaking it, e.g., when the toys in Toy Story scare the crap out of Sid by talking to him. I think the talking dogs in Up constitute one of the larger narrative missteps Pixar has made in a while.
Three: It’s been pointed out that by prefacing their movies with shorts Pixar recreates the old-timey experience of moviegoing: that’s added to here by beginning the film with a newsreel. (The news-and-interviews opening of The Incredibles comes close to achieving the same feel.)
Four: Pixar’s movies continue to evidence a great deal of reflection on the visual storytelling styles of silent film. The first half-hour of WALL•E will probably always be the definitive example of this, but the two most moving scenes of Up, by a long shot, are silent: a montage-like passage through the whole married life of a couple, from youth to old age, and then, near the end of the film, the husband paging through his wife’s scrapbook and discovering for the first time her deepest understanding of their life together. Both scenes are filmmaking at something close to its very best.
Five: I know this sounds like an incredibly English-professorish thing to say, but the plot of Up owes a great deal to Virgil’s Aeneid. Think about it for a minute: Aeneas is forced out of his home by hostile forces and in the process loses his beloved wife — yet that same wife encourages him to pursue a new life in another land. For much of the poem his old life in Troy is a burden to him: in a much-painted scene, Book II ends with him leaving Troy carrying his father on his back and leading his young son by the hand.
In Up, Carl Fredericksen loses his beloved wife and then is forced from their home — or rather, is forced from their property: he manages to take the home with him. Throughout his travels he treasures the mementoes of his life with Ellie, much as the wandering Aeneas carefully preserves the household gods of Troy. Then, in a distant land, Carl drags his balloon-lifted house by a garden hose that he has wrapped around his torso, while also leading a young boy who becomes like a son, or grandson, to him. Like Aeneas, he ultimately has to learn to make his past a source of inspiration for the future rather then a burden; and he gets encouragement to do this from his dead wife.
Unlike Aeneas, though, he gets to come back home, in a sense — a bit of the Odyssey grafted on, perhaps. There are only so many plots in the world, after all, and they get used and re-used in wonderfully various ways.
Pixar are masters at pulling you in emotionally in the opening sequences – which is probably an essential part of getting you to accept the CGI world rather than spend the whole movie examining it at a distance as a technical marvel.
— Steve C · Jun 8, 01:19 AM · #
Great commentary. I just saw it last night, and was blown away by how moving the silent first portion was. Highly recommended.
— Mike · Jun 8, 01:57 AM · #
Agreed – there’s a gem of a movie hidden away in Up about marriage and old age and grief and memories – it’s intensely moving. But the wrapping it comes in is sentimental and a tad overworked. The boy annoyed the hell out of me with his continuous prattle and the way the film-makers made him so needy. The talking dogs, I thought, were a welcome respite from the boy — and the gag about the one whose circuits get screwed up is hilarious. By far the best thing about the movie was Mr. Frederickson’s expression when he thinks about his wife — just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.
— scritic · Jun 8, 03:31 AM · #
I have to say, both Megan and I really loved the dogs. If anything, I thought more could’ve been done with them. (What does dog society look like? Dog training regimens? Dog entertainment? We got glimpses, but not much.) Dug, in particular, seemed to capture the essence of family dogness — perhaps not a huge accomplishment, but I can’t think of another movie off the top of my head that actually pulls this off. The only thing that bothered me about the dogs were the personalities of the bad dogs — they seemed to swing back and forth a bit too much between essentially human henchmen and doggier personalities.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 8, 06:59 AM · #
good observation on the aeneid, but what about the moby dick parallels? less strong, perhaps, but still there.
— dth · Jun 8, 08:42 AM · #
dth, you’re right about the Moby Dick reference — Charles Muntz is rather getting his Ahab on, isn’t he?
And Peter, I had to say something critical, if only to throw Freddie a bone. (Get it? Throw Freddie a bone?)
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 8, 01:16 PM · #
The opening scene for me was a reference to the 3D experience. It starts with the exact view that we physically had (in a theater) looking over heads watching a screen with everyone wearing Carl styled 50’s glasses. The inspiration that Carl gets from that experience is the inspiration we get for seeing “Pixar’s first 3D movie”. I’m not sure what that means when the direction the movie takes is that adventure is about the relationships we have with people around us. It seams they are saying “3D theater will inspire you, but ultimately it will let you down”. Perhaps that really is the message that making us self aware in the first scene—by mirroring our experience so directly—is getting across.
There seems to be a lot of that kind of undercutting with Pixar: redeeming the animated “mouse” from Disney as they join with Disney, anti-commercialization in Wall-e yet mass producing Wall-e trinkets. Maybe that’s what makes their work something that can be taken seriously.
— Ryan · Jun 8, 04:17 PM · #
I am surprised I haven’t heard more about Hayao Miyazaki’s influence on Up. Disney distributes his movies (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away) and the Pixar folks are all over the DVD special features talking about them.
Not only are some of the tropes shared – vintage air machines, moving buildings, but the tone of sentimentality and casual surrealism is similar as well.
— Judge Crater · Jun 8, 06:40 PM · #
I thought ‘Up’ was a fine film to be sure, but the ‘Partly Cloudy’ short at the beginning was the real gem in the linneage of Pixar gems; them at their artistic best. In a short few minutes I was laughing and weeping at the faults and kindnesses of the human condition. In both the film and the short I once again appreciated Pixar’s decision to not use short-hand cuteness: rounded features everywhere and big cutesy eyes. Instead faces have goofy, dis-proportional elements, and characters gesticulate like idiosyncratic humans rather than with an infantile simplicity of movement. It’s why the films end up feeling actually adorable – the way friends can be adorable – rather than saccharine. Oh, besides the absurdity, I did think the narrative of ‘Up’ ran out of steam during the last half hour of Indiana Jones-esque sequences, which i have not felt in a Pixar before. Oh well, still a good flick.
— ben jefferies · Jun 9, 07:14 PM · #
The difference between Pixar and Dreamworks is that Dreamworks animals are human sitcom characters in fur suits and the “humor” (with the delightful exception of Kung Fu Panda) is spouting an outdated pop culture catchphrase (HA HA that hippo just said “YOU GO GIRL” HAHAHAHA!).
Pixar at least created an (entertaining) reason for their animals to talk, and their humor came from creatively making the animals act (and talk) like animals.
I only wish that more (any?) science-fiction films would feature extraterrestrials with minds and behavior as “alien” as the dogs in this film. I can’t believe you gave a thumbs-down to such an inventive, entertaining, well-executed premise.
— Michael Straight · Jun 10, 06:58 PM · #