IMDb #115 Review: Up (2009)

Source: Wikipedia

The title of this Pixar adventure helpfully indicates in which direction it is misleading us. Not up, it's down. From America to South America, from soaring dreams to grounded reality, from breezy comedy to zephyrs of romance to doldrums of tragedy to the squalls of raging geezers clumsily dueling on a nosediving zeppelin.

A quiet nerdy boy meets a loud nerdy girl. They marry, grow old, endure tragedy along the way. Life eats their dreams and shits them out as lost time.

So the retired balloon salesman revenges himself on physics and society. He exacerbates the world helium shortage. He circumvents urban expansion and a pending lawsuit and the nursing home system by raising his decrepit technicolor homestead into the stratosphere. Using balloons. Many, many balloons.

Without proper steering or navigational equipment, the impossible flying house impossibly reaches its destination. The wild jungle of Paradise Falls, Venezuela.

Nothing can stop him now. Except a stowaway, a chubby Asian Boy-Scout-in-all-but-name (see: violently defended copyright).

The old grouch sends the kid on a snipe hunt. The kid returns with a hyper-intelligent chocolate-loving rainbow ostrich. Which the kid dubs Kevin.

In the untamed jungle of Venezuela, away from oil crises and drug wars and raging totalitarianism, there's a valley of weirdness. Realism need not apply. An elderly explorer can maintain a zeppelin large enough to house an airborne paleontology museum, staffed by talking dogs whose translation collars let them share their moronic thoughts with the world. This explorer guy has to be truly ancient; by now he's sunk so much time into his snipe hunt that he's not above cold-blooded murder.

Here we have Pixar at its silliest and downright darkest. It's presumably a realistic universe (despite, you know, balloons lifting a house and collars explicating canine minds), where the real magic happens in the animation and soundtrack and storytelling. The kids laugh; the adults fight back tears and hug their kids more often.

Anyway, the old man (the one with a cinderblock for a head, literally and figuratively) learns about the rigors of moving and moving on. The kid learns about the inherent risks of assisting the elderly. Sometimes you cross the street, sometimes another continent, and sometimes you're picking a dogfight with a flying fortress and a squadron of dogs in biplanes.

Like old age, happens to the best of us.