Loaded Couch Potatoes

Honk Mahfah reviews the tenth feature film from Pixar: Up.

Spoilers!

You just know that sooner or later, Pixar is going to put out an inferior product.  Yeah, sure, I know … some of you are saying “they already did, it was called Cars!”

Well, you’d be wrong about that.

And you’d also probably be wrong to think that Pixar is EVER going to put out an inferior product.  Because if Up isn’t it, it’s probably never going to happen.

This is a movie that really shouldn’t work at all: it’s kinda like a mix of Crystal Skull-style cartoon action set pieces with Benjamin Button-style pathos, but better than both put together.  Sounds crazy, right?  Right you are.  And did I mention the talking dogs that fly fighter planes?  That sounds like a recipe for disaster, but instead, it’s yet another classic from the folks at Pixar.

The movie begins with what is possibly the best sequence in the company’s history (which is saying something): young Carl Fredricksen, a fan of noted adventurer C.W. Muntz, meets Ellie, a fire-haired ball of energy who shares his interest in Muntz and his tales of Paradise Falls; they grow up, fall in love, get married, learn they can’t have children, grow old, and death does them part.  This opening segment is utterly involving; I’m tempted to call it perfect, and probably would if I believed perfection was possible (it isn’t).  Mostly played out via montage and free of dialogue, the sequence could have been maudlin and cloying; instead, it’s a better piece of romantic drama (and tragedy) than 99 out of 100 tragic romantic dramas would be capable of achieving.

You listening, Benjamin Button?  This is how that sort of thing is done.

I can sympathize with the people who are going to make the claim that the movie is all downhill from that point.  They aren’t entirely incorrect, if you look at the film from a certain point of view.  The opening sequence is a masterpiece of realism (whimsical realism, granted, but realism nonetheless), and the rest of the movie takes some strange, if amusing, turns into silliness and escapism.  The opening is so grounded, so emotionally charged, that you can imagine even the hardened hearts at Cannes having to dab at their eyes with their ascots.  How they took to the spectacle of talking dogs, giant birds, and a house that flies to South America using scores of helium balloons … well, I wouldn’t be surprised if they felt a little bit betrayed by it all, having been temporarily lulled into forgetting that they were watching a “mere” cartoon.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if parents and their children felt a little bit betrayed by the opening sequence, but were enraptured by the rest of the film.

And if this movie has a problem, I think that’s it.  As great a movie as I think it is, I also think that its two wildly divergent tones are going to fail to gel for a lot of people.  To a lesser extent, WALL*E had the same “problem”; all movies should be so unlucky as to have that problem, but audiences didn’t embrace WALL*E quite as fervently as critics embraced it, and I suspect the same thing will happen on a larger scale with Up.

For me, though, it all fits together relatively well, with the movie’s overriding tone and theme being one of acceptance, optimism, and rejuvenation; the sillier elements are silly, it’s true, but they are there to keep the whole thing from becoming too dark and heavy to stay afloat, and as such, they are probably essential.  It’s all neatly summarized by the central image the marketing has been employing: a house being held aloft by balloons.

It’s a rich image on its own accord, and it’s even richer once you know what the house actually represents: it represents love, and not just any old love, but a very specific love, the love between Carl and his deceased wife.  It represents the existence of their love (which, apparently, flourished for decades), which can never truly die; it also represents the nonexistence of their love, which, in some regards, died with Ellie and can never return in a literal sense; and it also represents the rejuvenation of that love through both Carl’s attempts to fulfill their childhood desires and Ellie’s posthumous advice to Carl to find “a new adventure.”

That love, in essence, is what the entire movie is about.  It is THE motivating force behind every single action Carl takes, and Carl’s obsession with honoring that love is mirrored in some way by all of the film’s other major characters: Russell is obsessed with getting his final merit badge so that he can earn his father’s love; “Kevin” (a rare species of bird) is obsessed with getting back to her children and feeding them; Dug the dog is obsessed first by capturing Kevin, and then by helping Carl, because he is trying to please his masters.  Even C.W. Muntz, who turns out to be a villain, is obsessed with capturing Kevin so that he can return to society and re-earn their love, which he feels he has long since lost.

Running underneath all of this is a slam-dunk of a score by Michael Giacchino, who turns in his second great score of May 2009 (Star Trek was the other) and his third great score for Pixar (he also composed The Incredibles and Ratatouille).  Giacchino’s work here is based on one theme: a love theme for Carl and Ellie, which works wonders during the opening sequence as a piano piece and reappears throughout the film, sometimes in the same sad-piano guise, but sometimes reorchestrated into action music.  Over the opening credits, it turns into a breezy jazz version.  This is the type of thing John Williams once did (and still occasionally does when he comes out of retirement) with seeming effortlessness, and if Giacchino continues to do work this impressive, then we may have a new heir apparent for the title of Best Working Film Composer.

I’ve been talking too much about how Serious and Important this movie is, and I’m not wrong, but I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t talk about how funny the movie is.  There isn’t nearly as much “lookit the funny old man” humor as you might expect; there’s a little, but mostly, the film gets its yuks from strange plot developments.  One of the best comes when Carl has a daydream about dropping Russell to the city streets below; what a strange moment for a kid’s movie!  Another laugh comes from Carl as a child falling through a hole in the floor and breaking his arm.  Haw-haw!

The strangest development of all, of course, comes when the talking dogs are introduced.  To be fair, they don’t actually talk; no, they wear collars that somehow translate their thoughts into human speech.  This is just as weird as it sounds.

And yet, Pixar is able to keep it grounded by giving the dogs personalities and actions which will be instantly familiar to anyone who has ever owned a dog.  Dug may have a talking collar, but when he sees — or thinks he sees — a squirrel, he’s instantly distracted.  (One of my favorite bits in the movie is when Dug decides to tell Carl and Russell a joke.  It goes something like this: “A squirrel walks up to a tree and says it is winter and I have not gathered any nuts and now I am dead.  It is a funny joke because the squirrel gets dead.”  If you don’t laugh at Dug’s delivery of this joke, then fuck you; you don’t deserve to laugh.)

All of the dogs move like real dogs, and except for the cartoon-faced Dug, they all look like real dogs; if you told me Marley in Marley and Me was a CGI creation by Pixar, I’d probably believe you.  This extreme attention to detail reminds me of the kinds of things Disney animation under Walt himself accomplished in movies like Snow White and Dumbo and (especially) Bambi; the animals were cartoons, yes, and sometimes cartoonish, but they were also real.  That mix of reality and unreality is something animation can do that no other art form can; and Pixar, as a company, is a master at it.  This is how it is able to get away with having dogs serve wine and fly fighter planes.

And when the dogs-flying-fighter-planes sequence (they steer and fire by biting rubber squeeze toys!) is brought to an end by Russell hollering “squirrel!” and pointing at the ground, well, somehow, I believe it would work that way.

Every moment of such silliness is earned, both by virtue of it being funny in its own right, and by the presence of some serious moment to balance things out.  The dogs might have parachutes strapped to their backs (hilarious!), but when C.W. Muntz falls out of Carl’s floating house, he falls to his death.  That’s how this movie goes; it’s a constant high-wire act, and Pixar (under the capable direction of Pete Docter and Bob Petersen, both of whom also wrote the movie) makes it to the other side with barely a hitch.

Like all of Pixar’s movies, this is is jam-packed with details, but I think I’ve written enough about the movie for now.  It’s eminently enjoyable, and while I’m not convinced it’s going to be received as rapturously as, say, Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, I think it’s safe to say that Pixar is now officially ten-for-ten.  At what point do we have to start looking through the history books to find out if ANY company in the entire history of cinema has managed to make ten consecutive movies as good great as Pixar’s first ten?  I think that moment may have come.  I can’t think of a single director who managed it; I can’t think of a single star who managed it, either.  And studios…?  Don’t make me laugh.

I don’t think it’s going too far out on a limb to suggest that Pixar’s ten-film stretch might be the most significant string of successes in film history.  If I’m wrong, then by all means, point me toward the truth; because I promise you, I’d LOVE to see the string of movies better than this one has been.

Before I go, I’d like to offer up a few parting words of praise for Partly Cloudy, the short which runs before Up.  It’s yet another classic Pixar short (throw all the short fimls into the mix and Pixar’s streak becomes even more daunting), and it actually deepens the feature that follows it.  Set in the sky, where the clouds fashion babies out of thin air and hand them over for delivery to an army of storks, Partly Cloudy is, simply, awesome.  There’s more that could be said about it, but really, what would the point be?

Oscar, you’d better be paying attention this year come Best Animated Short time.