Film Review: Up (3D)

The only other Pixar film I've seen is Finding Nemo. Yes. Really. And that was Christmas two years ago in the lead up to Doctor Who's Kylie Minogue spesh. I liked Nemo, but couldn't rave about it.

A quirk of my personality is that I don't usually enjoy animation like that. I appreciate it; it just doesn't grab me like other media do. I don't really enjoy comic books, either - though, again, I appreciate them. I appreciate the work that goes into the creation of the form. Often I enjoy the stories. It's just the media. I don't know why; it just is.

Now, that doesn't mean I try to avoid it. Of course I'll go see a film when the opportunity presents itself. In this case it was a screening at the British Film Institute (BFI). It was a preview screening and I'm very glad I took the opportunity because it was utterly delightful.

The story is that of a white American lad named Carl Fredricksen who, as a kid, was growing up in what looked like Depression-era USA. He's a typical kid, with his head in the clouds. A huge fan of explorer Charles Muntz, who had just announced his attempt to return to South America to find a strange bird that has eluded him. Carl meets Ellie, a bratty kid who is also obsessed with balloon exploration and Muntz. She has an adventure book, empty, waiting to be filled when her - soon their - adventures of following Muntz. They fall in love, marry, can't have children of their own, but grow old together in the old dump of a house where they first met. Then Ellie dies and Carl is bereft. His house is stuck in the middle of a building site and the builders want him gone.

Most of that takes place in an adorable sequence of snapshots and clips. It's beautifully done, hitting exactly the right emotional key.

When things go back to a typical narrative speed, Carl is harassed by Junior Wilderness Explorer Russell, a kid desperate to get his 'helping the elderly' badge. Events occur (hey, I don't want to give you the whole plot!) and Carl rigs up the house to fly it to South America. Russell accidentally goes with the house, and somehow they make it Paradise Falls, Venezuela, the place in South America where Ellie and Carl had always wanted to go. The 'landing' isn't smooth, of course, and Russell 'helps' Carl take the house through the jungle. It's there that they run into the path of talking dogs hunting a mysterious bird.

Talking dogs. Uh-huh. How they talk is entirely part of the logic of this film. They wear special collars that translate their thoughts into English speech. Quite by accident, Russell finds one of the birds, and a mutt of a dog finds them. The Alpha Male dog then finds them, and takes them all back to the big cave system where they live in a blimp - with an elderly Muntz! Muntz has clearly gone mad, chaos ensues, but eventually our heroes are victorious.

They are heroes. Carl, the main hero, grows from his experiences. While he's an old man for much of the film, he hadn't really changed that much from the awkward, dreamy kid Ellie befriended and then married. It's not until he's facing his childhood idol that he grows up. Russell and the mutt of a dog also do quite a bit of growing up.

It's so rare to see that kind of growing up journey in films these days it was a delight. But the thing I found remarkable was its emotional maturity. It wasn't emotional manipulation by numbers, which always gets my cynical hackles up. It had tapped into humanity. The characters - although all caricatures in many ways, still rang true. There wasn't any lecturing, or hectoring, or twisting them to do things they wouldn't with the cynical aim of getting an audience reaction. I was laughing because the situations were funny. My eyes teared up a few times because they were genuinely moving moments.

This movie was also the first time I'd ever seen 3D properly. Aside from one small moment when stuff gave the illusion of coming out of the screen at you the concentration was adding depth to the canvas. They had paid attention to this, and it showed. It never distracted attention away from the story, and I never felt it was trying to do that.

I doff my hat to the writers, director and producers of this lovely little film.