Looking Up

Two things:

First, that's not the theatrical poster over to the right, it's an alternative poster done by Eric Tan, whose blog can be found here.

Second, I most admit that I have made a mistake. A week or so ago I wrote up my top seven films of the year with Up at #6. Upon rewatching it for this review I have realized how wrong I was. I regret not watching it again before writing that because I hadn't seen it since May and its effect had dimmed in my memory. I would like to make amends and declare Up my second favorite film of 2009, making my official list:

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Up
3. A Serious Man
4. The Princess and the Frog
5. Observe and Report
6. Coraline
7. Star Trek

It seems like madness that I would put Up so low on my list when I so vehemently declared it the best film Pixar has yet produced. Oh, yes, I know that's a big statement, and after all, there's no genre-bending or gap-bridging or technology-striding in Up. It used to be a pretty solid punch-out between Wall-E and The Incredibles for the title of Best Pixar Film, but I think Up manages to come out on top . Maybe I need to watch Wall-E again; after all, I keep a Wall-E figurine on my desk.

Picking a favorite Pixar film is stupid, though. To watch a Pixar film is to be shot in the head with quality and have your brains paint a wall that is exuberance. Up is simultaneously Pixar's most emotionally potent, most fun, most exciting and funniest film. It's the tale of a lonely old widower named Carl Fredricksen. The world is moving fast around him and he has no reason to change. When his wife died he lost not only his wife, but the person who had been his life partner since they were children and the more willfull half of his existence. In his depressed stupor he commits assault and ties 20,000 balloons to his house in honor of his wife's memory. He kidnaps a child named Russell and escapes to Peru. Little does he know that the United States has had an extradition agreement with Peru since 2001, but that never really comes up.

Mainly the narrative is thus: Man lives entire life promising himself and his wife adventure. They lead a happy, if ordinary life and then she dies. He goes off to find adventure and has adventure. He feels rejuvenated by the relationship he has with a young boy, bereft of fatherly influence.

The opening of the film is very realistic and then we introduce the unrealistic Adventure! aspects to bring Carl's arc together. This would be an easy pitfall for any creative team that wasn't Pixar, but they manage to ground the Adventure! and merge it with the more tragic elements of the story. Sure, it's jarring, it's meant to be jarring, but the film never loses sight of its story or characters and is all the richer for managing a huge tonal shift right in the middle and knowing that the best way to do that is to anchor the film with strong characters.

Carl himself is a wonderfully squatty little creature, seemingly composed entirely of squares. He's introduced in that most emotionally wrenching of opening montages that you've obviously heard praised endlessly, so I'll avoid analyzing that particular scene. I hypothesize that his entire character, and therefore the entire film (remember that we established the entire film rests on the shoulders of the characters to keep the mad tone shift from tearing it in half like a smilie face earthquake) rests on this montage. If we didn't feel and understand every bit of Carl's pain, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crochety old fucker and an unpleasant protagonist (a common critical loophole if you haven't gotten your quota of negative reviews filled for the month).

The supporting characters are all magnificent, including Russell, the innocent, excitable wilderness explorer who stows away on Carl's house, Kevin, the giant multicolored bird that Russell adopts and who speaks in squawks and whose movements provide some of the funniest physical comedy I've ever seen, and Dug, the dog who has been given the gift of speech and says exactly what a dog would say if a dog could speak, which is so fucking awesome that I want to kick every filmmaker that made a movie with a talking dog and it wasn't like this right in the fucking shins.

Rounding out the supporting cast is my favorite Pixar villain, Charles Muntz. I have a special place in my heart of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast because his stake in that film's plot is purely emotional. Similarly, Muntz has spent decades hunting the mythical Beast of Paradise Falls (Kevin) and is the owner of Dug and the inventor of the collar that allows him to speak. The Adventure! plot is just so damn well-constructed and so full of exciting action sequences and so well connected to the rest of the story. Dug and Kevin are easily my favorite Pixar comic relief characters.

And those action sequences, oh my those action sequences. With so many films trying to be throwbacks to 1930s adventure serials, it seems a stroke of simple genius to set the film in present day but employ elderly characters using antique machines, allowing the filmmakers to posit the showstopping climax on top of a zeppelin. I don't remember thinking that the climax was so marvelous when I saw the film in theaters, but it's received three individual viewings since I rewatched the film this morning. The most shocking and effective moment in this scene is the reveal of the gun, which works for a few reasons. First, how common is a gun in an animated film? Second, not a single weapon is shown throughout the film. It is, after all, an adventure film, not an action film (learn the difference, Hollywood). But I don't want to demean the actual reveal, the use of music and cinematography, the reactions of the characters, the soundscape. All of these things work in harmony throughout the film and appropriately peak at the climax.

Of course, that's the case with all Pixar films. Up is stupidly, ridiculously gorgeous as as piece of cinematography and is the primary argument for those retarded awards ceremonies to share some of that Cinematography gold with animated films (the cinematographer's guild just gave a nomination to Avatar; we may be getting somewhere). That is, if Wall-E didn't already convince you. And as always, Pixar gives us the best original score of the year, this time courtesy of Michael Giacchino, one of the best composers working today.

But I'm wasting my time. You know all this, you don't need me to tell you. Pixar doesn't make bad movies. They just don't. If Cars were a Dreamworks film (and that's a fair criticism), it would be Dreamworks' masterpiece. Every time they release a film it's a masterpiece to topple their previous masterpiece. If you don't like Pixar, you're fucking stupid.

10/10