Wall*E<\/a>), before getting to the real story.\u00a0 Up begins with 10-year old Carl worshiping an adventurer named Charles Muntz who adorns the silver screen in the film’s alt-1930s.\u00a0 Little Carl then meets little Ellie, who quickly pulls him into her vivacious, adventurer’s fantasy life, and then into an adult life, highlighted by a shared dream of going to Paradise Falls, South America, as well as the more mundane dream of raising a family together.\u00a0 In 15 minutes, we see Carl and Ellie’s whole life which, alas, ends with neither children nor exotic travel.<\/p>\nThe real story is how old man Carl decides to escape his retirement home destiny, and belatedly fulfill his promise to Ellie by flying their house to Paradise Falls using thousands of balloons.\u00a0 Carl is unexpectedly joined by the young, fabulously obese Wilderness Explorer, Russell.\u00a0 (There is nothing functional about Russell’s obesity in this story, which makes the device curious given Pixar’s target audience and PC morality.)\u00a0 At first blush, Russell echoes the youthful explorer spirit possessed by Carl about six decades years earlier, now rekindled.\u00a0 But Russell’s story turns out to a bit different.<\/p>\n
Warning:\u00a0 Spoilers under the fold.<\/p>\n
While Carl was overcoming a sense of having failed Ellie, Russell turns out to be driven by a sense of missing his father.\u00a0 The genius of Pixar is that they open up these voids very deliberately and subtly until they become a background in the film.\u00a0 At the end of the adventure involving the boy, a colorful, flightless bird, talking dogs, and a dirigible, Carl finally realizes that Ellie didn’t feel that he failed her at all.\u00a0 In fact, she considered their ordinary life to be an adventure.\u00a0 (Tess cried.)\u00a0 Russell and Carl, naturally, end up filling each other’s voids for a father and a child.<\/p>\n
While the movie was splendid in so many ways, it fell short in several.\u00a0 My biggest problems with this movie involved the reintroduction of Charles Muntz in the middle of the film as a foil for Carl and Russell.\u00a0 I was disappointed with how suddenly the subtleties of relationships in this film got tossed out the window, like Russell’s GPS, when it came to Muntz.\u00a0 The film could easily have explored the pathos of Muntz’s predicament, and how his unfulfilled dream conflicted with those of the other characters.\u00a0 Instead, Up uses this encounter for a quick plot twist that turns into good versus evil.\u00a0 Did the writers run out of time under an animation deadline?<\/p>\n
The movie also embedded some bad math.\u00a0 Muntz was Carl’s adult hero in the 1930s.\u00a0 In their encounter later in the film, they both looked like old men of about the same generation.\u00a0 Absent any explanation that Paradise Falls somehow fed a fountain of youth, by the time Carl is in his 70s, Muntz would have to be a centenarian; he wasn’t plausibly portrayed that way in the film.\u00a0 I could let this nit in the timeline pass if the encounter with Muntz were absolutely necessary to the film, but it wasn’t.\u00a0 Neither were Muntz’s talking (and cooking) dogs.\u00a0 Since the writers bother to offer a technological basis the dogs’s speech, I feel it should have gotten me at least half way across the spectrum of suspended disbelief for a device that otherwise added so little to the plot.\u00a0 I guess Disney couldn’t have let a film go out the door without talking animals.\u00a0 I would have written Muntz and his canine entourage into the picture on very different terms, or not at all.<\/p>\n
Despite these pitfalls, the movie was richly entertaining.\u00a0 We saw it in 3-D, but what that gave us in visual depth it took away in brightness.\u00a0 Fortunately, the movie’s character depth was enough to make the film worthwhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pixar’s secret to their dominance over other movie studios:\u00a0 their films tell a good story.\u00a0 Other studios offer great acting, as does Pixar.\u00a0 Other films have great cinematography and graphics, often good enough to match Pixar’s spectacular animation.\u00a0 But Pixar’s movies have to appeal to the imagination of kids, and they do so by telling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1549"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1555,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549\/revisions\/1555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.bestdisneysites.com\/joomla\/images\/stories\/upewphoto.jpg\" "\\"Up\\"")
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