Let's Stop
Congratulating Pixar
by Chris Knipp

Up punctures the balloon of the Pixar studio's perfection. Despite clever visuals and a world of charm, it's a thorough disappointment. The film's plot line plays simplistically with Pixar's cross-generational appeal by having an oldster and a kid as its main characters. It's a buddy picture about the voyage of Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), a 78-year-old widower, and Russell (Jordan Ngai), a chubby eight-year-old Asian "Wilderness Explorer" who wants to earn an "assisting the elderly" badge. The movie "teaches" us that we can still realize our life-long deferred dream of exploring South American by just attaching thousands of helium balloons to our house and sailing away.

It's hard to say if Frederickson's life hitherto has been fulfillment or disappointment. His wife Ellie (Elie Docter) was a childhood playmate who dreamed of emulating an explorer named Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who has found a prehistoric bird in South America's Paradise Falls plateau. They never go very far. Ellie, alas, can't have children. One day when they're both in their senior years she falls down and shortly thereafter dies. Fredrickson has had a career as a balloon salesman.

The film sketches in the couple's life as sweetness and smiles, yet hints at a world of disappointment symbolized by Ellie's "adventure" scrapbook, which was never filled. Poor old Fredericksen won't move to a retirement home even though his little house is now surrounded by a vast loud construction zone. The demeaning practicalities of aging are depicted as something to escape from -- magically. When Fredericksen strikes an agent of the contractors and gets branded as a public menace he's somehow legally mandated to the old folks' home: this is the moment when he flies away, taking his house with him, with Russell a stowaway.

There's no doubt about the exhilaration of an aerial escape, or the charm of the bond that develops between the old man and his dutiful, plucky little sidekick. But the wacky journey goes haywire. Up gets into deep trouble wit the arrival of the dogs, dozens of them, with electronic flashing collars that enable them to talk in squeaky (or sometimes deep) voices, in various languages according to what button you push. Forgive me, but I didn't buy it, and I just didn't see the need. Mr. Fredericksen is sold to us initially as a pretty feeble old man and so the strength and vigor he develops in South America is hard to accept. There's something to be said for a story that ends with the awarding of an explorer scout patch for assisting the elderly. All Russell really wanted to do was help the old man across the street, -- or even just across his lawn. But the whole adventure winds up being little more than a distractingly primitive kinetic exercise, like an old Looney Toons short.

I want to love Pixar films. With some so-so stepping-stones along the way, their animated features have been moving from strength to strength. The Incredibles was energetic and smart, Ratatouille was witty and sophisticated, and WALL·E was transcendent -- thought-provoking and touching. Up isn't "up" to their standard.

The house of Pixar has been declared triumphant in the field. Denby of The New Yorker heralds Pixar animations as examples of "moral fable" and damns the old Disney ones as mere "psychological fables" marred by "cloyingness" and "malevolent overtones." Well, Up is full of cloyingness and weirdness, and the latter part of its adventure has its fair share of malevolence. The movie is a hugely overblown fantasy whose point is lost in endless violations of the laws of biology and physics.

It won't help if you're forced, as you may be, to watch Up in 3-D. The glasses, on top of your own, weigh upon and pinch your nose and the dimmed images with the planar levels they create are as flat and fake-looking as your grandmother's stereopticon slides. This Fifties movie gimmick with its chintzy throwaway plastic specs is unconvincingly heralded as the great new technology. It didn't do much for the creepy Coraline, the fascistic U2/3D, still less for the slipshod Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, and it only detracted from Zemeckis' watchable Beowulf. 3-D is supposed to look incredibly real, but even granting this dubious claim, why use it for Up, which flaunts its unreality? Its digital figures are like painted toys. Its Paradise Falls looks unabashedly like paper-mâché rocks and fake foam. The Pixar images pop out at you without the effect of 3-D imaging, the colors are brighter, and the experience is more absorbing. Why not let us use our own imaginations?

There's some thrill of adventure in this movie, and certainly the titillation of swooping flights and dives through space, as well as the time-honored animation scare of teetering on a precipice, and going into free fall only to be magically saved. But this, compared to the best Pixar films, gets lost in its gimmicks at the cost of a meaningful tale. Of course a travel yarn is just one thing after another anyway, and there's' no harm in an adventure with the moral of a good deed attached to it. But that's just what it is, though: attached. And how much richer were the worlds of WALL·E, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles! Up has less to offer to adults than they did.

©2009 Chris Knipp
CineScene