As a bit of personal Super Bowl counter-programming, we decided to watch Up. In short: what a wonderful movie.
Over the last year or so I’ve slowly been making my way through Pixar’s catalog and I have to say that, with just a few misses here and there – I’m looking at you A Bug’s Life and Cars – their movies have not only been great but have been getting progressively better with each new one.
Up really succeeded in all the areas that mattered – it made the characters realistic enough to be able to empathize with their issues but also cartoonish enough to be able to not lose your suspension of disbelief when the story moved into the more action-oriented parts.
The ten minute or so dialogue-free montage of Carl and Ellie’s life together in the beginning of the movie was just brilliant filmmaking and worth the price of admission alone. What Pixar accomplished in those ten minutes most movies can’t manage in their whole run times.
In my mind, the success of Up really belongs to the quality of the writing as Pixar has already progressed computer animation just about as far as it could go with Wall-E. For the first time in a long time a movie was willing to show rather than tell and leave it up to the viewer to pick up on the themes being communicated – the recurring subtext of the absent, divorced father is a good example.
Up‘s just about the best movie I’ve seen all year, and I’m hard pressed to think of one that I’ve enjoyed more.
