Up: This Time, Pixar Has Gone Too Far

By Eileen Jones, eXiled Online. Posted June 3, 2009.

Up starts off with chunks of wordless bathos, presumably to remind you how great Wall-E was. I’ll let Manohla Dargis of the New York Times tell it:

The movie opens with the young Carl enthusing over black-and-white newsreel images of his hero, a world-famous aviator and explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Shortly thereafter, Carl meets Ellie, a plucky, would-be adventurer who, a few edits later, becomes his beloved wife, an adult relationship that the director Pete Docter brilliantly compresses into some four wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment and grow happily old side by side. Like the opener of "Wall-E"… this is filmmaking at its purest.

The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter and the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are looking back to the silent era, as Andrew Stanton did with the Chaplinesque start to "Wall-E."

(Another word of advice: when somebody tells you it’s "filmmaking at its purest," hit the exit. Impure cinema is the kind you want.)

I don’t think I’m giving much away by telling you they kill off Ellie. And there you are, maybe fifteen minutes into the film, with the tragedy of old man Carl (Ed Asner), who’s only crabby because he’s bereft.

By this point, adults all around the theater are snuffling. Their feral kids, oppressed by the tearful mood, start babbling uneasily. And you realize, to your horror, that now the film will have to TOP this pity party. There are masses of objects associated with the dead wife that will have to "pay off" again and again for increasingly sobby effect -- her "Adventurer" scrapbook with its tragically empty pages, her bird knickknack she put on the mantle, her chair, photos of her, the house itself. Plus Carl’s cross-my-heart promise to her to have adventures in South America will have to be milked over and over, and his crustiness will have to be softened by that chubby kid in the previews.

And don’t think for a second they’ll stop in their tear-jerking efforts with the chubby kid, who’s got no mother to love him, only an absentee dad. Oh, no. Pixar hedges its bets by adding a cute dog who’s rejected by his dog pack. And a large endangered-species bird, which gets injured and hobbles pitifully. And baby birds. And a beautiful golden-haired blind girl who sells flowers … no, I’m only kidding about her. That’s Chaplin again.

Truthfully, it was only the bird and the dog that saved me from bolting out of the theater. They rated some laughs.

So Carl rigs up his house with a million helium balloons and he and the kid fly off and have adventures and somehow you’d think this might add up to interesting 3-D effects. Sadly, no. (That’s a pretty good political humor site, by the way, Sadly, No! You should check it out.) There’s no point seeing this film in 3-D at all. In fact, the 3-D shades dim the film’s colors, so that’s a positive reason to watch it flat if you’re going to watch it at all.

Pisses me off that Coraline is going to lose the Best Animated Film Oscar to this thing.

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