Originally posted by LadyHathor25: I think if WALL-E couldn't get a Best Picture nmoination in last year's fairly weak field, that there is no way Up can. I mean, WALL-E was one of the best reviewed films of the year, made a gazillion top 10 lists, was a huge box office success and it didn't get nominated.
Even if this all replicates for Up, I can't see it happening. What, AMPAS members are going to suddenly throw Pixar a bone after this long? I'll believe it when I see it.
Well that's one valid way of looking at it.
However the other is that PIXAR is slowly building up towards their big break through and this could be the year. A few years ago they had Finding Nemo and The Incredibles that got a few mentions as deserving a best picture nomination but never considered. Then came Ratatouille that was thought as a rank outsider being a huge box-office earner and the most critically acclaimed film of the year. Then last year came WALL-E which was seriously considered by many being a huge box-office earner, the most critically accliamed film of the year and won the L.A. film critics award.
This may mean that Pixar will never get recognised. Or it may mean that momentum is building and the dam is about to break.
Assuming Up does as well as WALL-E and Ratatouille that will mean it will be the third year straight that Pixar has the best grossing/reviewd film combined. I think a nominations for best animated film is not something that can happen overnight something that takes time for the (slow) academy to take seriously.
With this build up over the past few years and academy friendly themes and subjects this film adressess and we could be looking at Pixar creating the perfect storm.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: Noble,
Congratulations West Wing, Emmys most honored drama. 27 Emmys including 4 best drama series "What's Next?"
Posts: 2455 | Location: Sydney, Australia | Registered: September 07, 2005
Originally posted by MissyGal: Yeah, unless Pixar creates some sort of masterpiece that simply can't be ignored, they'll never get a best picture nomination. They'll have to settle for animated feature.
Never say never. Disney said the same thing before Beauty and the Beast.
---- OSCAR FYC: Best Picture - "Up" Best Actor - Michael Stuhlbarg, "A Serious Man" Best Actress - Saoirse Ronan, "Lovely Bones" Best Supporting Actor - Christoph Waltz, "Basterds" Best Original Screenplay - "Up"
Posts: 1924 | Location: Right behind you. | Registered: December 07, 2007
Originally posted by MissyGal: Yeah, unless Pixar creates some sort of masterpiece that simply can't be ignored, they'll never get a best picture nomination. They'll have to settle for animated feature.
Never say never. Disney said the same thing before Beauty and the Beast.
And yet, this damn animation ghetto didn't exist then. If it was hard then....
I think they are going to have to win a screenplay award first. That would establish Pixar films as serious awards contenders and not just animated movies with good sound and music.
Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures Carl Fredericksen checking out some new neighbors in “Up.”
May 29, 2009 The House That Soared
By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: May 29, 2009
In its opening stretch the new Pixar movie “Up” flies high, borne aloft by a sense of creative flight and a flawlessly realized love story. Its on-screen and unlikely escape artist is Carl Fredricksen, a widower and former balloon salesman with a square head and a round nose that looks ready for honking. Voiced with appreciable impatience by Ed Asner, Carl isn’t your typical American animated hero. He’s 78, for starters, and the years have taken their toll on his lugubrious body and spirit, both of which seem solidly tethered to the ground. Even the two corners of his mouth point straight down. It’s as if he were sagging into the earth.
Eventually a bouquet of balloons sends Carl and his house soaring into the sky, where they go up, up and away and off to an adventure in South America with a portly child, some talking (and snarling and gourmet-cooking) dogs and an unexpected villain. Though the initial images of flight are wonderfully rendered — the house shudders and creaks and splinters and groans as it’s ripped from its foundation by the balloons — the movie remains bound by convention, despite even its modest 3-D depth. This has become the Pixar way. Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art and the bottom line.
In “Up” that divide is evident between the early scenes, which tell Carl’s story with extraordinary tenderness and brilliant narrative economy, and the later scenes of him as a geriatric action hero. The movie opens with the young Carl enthusing over black-and-white newsreel images of his hero, a world-famous aviator and explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Shortly thereafter, Carl meets Ellie, a plucky, would-be adventurer who, a few edits later, becomes his beloved wife, an adult relationship that the director Pete Docter brilliantly compresses into some four wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment and grow happily old side by side. Like the opener of “Wall-E” and the critic’s Proustian reminiscence of childhood in “Ratatouille,” this is filmmaking at its purest.
The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter and the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are looking back to the silent era, as Andrew Stanton did with the Chaplinesque start to “Wall-E.” Even so, partly because “Up” includes a newsreel interlude, its marriage sequence also brings to mind the breakfast table in “Citizen Kane.” In this justly famous (talking) montage, Orson Welles shows the collapse of a marriage over a number of years through a series of images of Kane and his first wife seated across from each other at breakfast, another portrait of a marriage in miniature. As in their finest work, the Pixar filmmakers have created thrilling cinema simply by rifling through its history.
Those thrills begin to peter out after the boy, Russell (Jordan Nagai), inadvertently hitches a ride with Carl, forcing the old man to assume increasingly grandfatherly duties. But before that happens there are glories to savor, notably the scenes of Carl — having decided to head off on the kind of adventure Ellie and he always postponed — taking to the air. When the multihued balloons burst through the top of his wooden house it’s as if a thousand gloriously unfettered thoughts had bloomed above his similarly squared head. Especially lovely is the image of a little girl jumping in giddy delight as the house rises in front of her large picture window, the sunlight through the balloons daubing her room with bright color.
In time Carl and Russell, an irritant whose Botero proportions recall those of the human dirigibles in “Wall-E,” float to South America where they, the house and the movie come down to earth. Though Mr. Docter’s visual imagination shows no signs of strain here — the image of Carl stubbornly pulling his house, now tethered to his torso, could have come out of the illustrated Freud — the story grows progressively more formulaic. And cuter. Carl comes face to face with his childhood hero, Muntz, an eccentric with the dashing looks and frenetic energy of a younger Kirk Douglas. Muntz lives with a legion of talking dogs with which he has been hunting a rare bird whose gaudy plumage echoes the palette of Carl’s balloons.
The talking dogs are certainly a hoot, including the slobbering yellow furball Dug and a squeaky-voiced Doberman, Alpha (both Mr. Peterson), not to mention the dog in the kitchen and the one that pops open the Champagne. And there’s something to be said about the revelation that heroes might not be what you imagined, particularly in a children’s movie and particularly one released by Disney. (Muntz seems partly inspired by Charles Lindbergh at his most heroic and otherwise.) But much like Russell, the little boy with father problems, and much like Dug, the dog with master issues, the story starts to feel ingratiating enough to warrant a kick. O.K., O.K., not a kick, just some gently expressed regret.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: seanflynn,
As buoyant and richly tinted as the balloons that figure so prominently in its story, Up is also thoroughly grounded in real emotion and ideas of substance. How's that for an instant boost? The result is a lovely, thoughtful, and yes, uplifting adventure (in 3-D where available) about an old guy, a kid, and a house that sails through the air, opening up new routes in life to people who thought they were stuck in their loneliness. The movie — which opened the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, a fresh choice — is Pixar's 10th commanding feature-length demonstration that the most inventive and fully rounded stories in movies today are being told by characters who require an animator's hand to breathe. Up is a beaut. And for once, 3-D animation proves its worth. (More on that in a moment.)
Up is a gentle ride, as befits the Walt Disney PG imprimatur. But I've rarely seen a message of such square sincerity — Life's biggest adventures can be found in your own backyard, shared with people you love! — told with such unselfconscious joy and bright good humor. Who says squares can't be hip? The star of the saga is a squat, sour old widower named Carl (voiced with Lou Grant-quality authority by Ed Asner), a balloon salesman in his late 70s with a head as blockish as a toaster. (Carl's boxy black eyeglass frames, sitting atop a Patch Adams bulb of a nose, only emphasize the set angles of his ways; the guy looks like a cross between Spencer Tracy and an eccentric out of a George Booth cartoon.) We learn that Carl's late wife, Ellie (who looks related to Helen Parr/Elastigirl from The Incredibles), was the real free spirit and would-be explorer of the family, and that the two always planned a trip-of-a-lifetime to a magical waterfall in South America. But daily living got in the way, and Carl and Ellie stayed put: A short, wordless tribute montage reviewing their lives together from childhood through childless marriage and old age is as deeply textured as any great novel.
A holdout in the neighborhood while colorless high-rises spring up around him, Carl sinks into emotional decrepitude — until two things happen. First, he decides to tie thousands of balloons to his old house and float to South America on his own. (He's that identifiable type, someone afraid of sampling the new without schlepping the familiar along for safety.) Second, in the days before takeoff, he's visited by a pint-size stranger. An overenthusiastic scouting-type misfit bursting with boyish energy, Russell (expressive newcomer Jordan Nagai) is as round and bouncy as a balloon himself. When he becomes an accidental stowaway on Carl's great adventure, he's unwelcome as far as Carl is concerned. But Russell turns out to be invaluable — not to mention loyal and trustworthy, a friend indeed.
Each specimen in the movie's wild parade of exotic South American animals is worth cheering, and the hilarious, acutely observed dogs who greet Carl and Russell in their new world deserve their own canine-centric spin-off feature. Likewise, under the tender direction of Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.), every detail of the production is quietly exquisite. (Docter co-wrote the screenplay with Bob Peterson, who gets a codirecting credit and also supplies the voice of Dug, the dog nerd in the pack.) Michael Giacchino's gorgeous music, invoking great Max Steiner scores from the '40s and '50s, steers the story's emotional shifts with great elegance. The renderings, the color palette, the small and generous jokes, the perspective as balloons lift a whole house in the air — all are breathtaking.
But the movie's most important accomplishment may be that we're never noodged or even urged to notice these things. Even the sophisticated effects now attainable in 3-D animation are worth about as much as a bunch of balloons unless we can feel what a character is going through, and why. At a press conference at Cannes after the first screening of Up, Disney·Pixar creative honcho John Lasseter explained that although he loves 3-D as a ''fun toy,'' he has no use for disruptive tricks that leap out of the screen. ''3-D should supply depth that furthers the emotion of the scene,'' he said. Can complicated technical virtuosity be reduced to something as simple as that? Yes, if you're Up to it. A
Posts: 27164 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
"Up" is a wonderful film, with characters who are as believable as any characters can be who spend much of their time floating above the rain forests of Venezuela. They have tempers, problems and obsessions. They are cute and goofy, but they aren't cute in the treacly way of little cartoon animals. They're cute in the human way of the animation master Hayao Miyazaki. Two of the three central characters are cranky old men, which is a wonder in this youth-obsessed era. "Up" doesn't think all heroes must be young or sweet, although the third important character is a nervy kid.
This is another masterwork from Pixar, which is leading the charge in modern animation. The movie was directed by Pete Docter, who also directed "Monsters, Inc.," wrote "Toy Story" and was the co-writer and first director on "WALL-E" before leaving to devote full time to this project. So Docter's one of the leading artists of this latest renaissance of animation.
The movie will be shown in 3-D in some theaters, about which I will say nothing, except to advise you to save the extra money and see it in 2-D. One of the film's qualities that is likely to be diminished by 3-D is its subtle and beautiful color palette. "Up," like "Finding Nemo," "Toy Story," "Shrek" and "The Lion King," uses colors in a way particularly suited to its content.
"Up" tells a story as tickling to the imagination as the magical animated films of my childhood, when I naively thought that because their colors were brighter, their character outlines more defined and their plots simpler, they were actually more realistic than regular films.
It begins with a romance as sweet and lovely as any I can recall in feature animation. Two children named Carl and Ellie meet and discover they share the same dream of someday being explorers. In newsreels, they see the exploits of a daring adventurer named Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who uses his gigantic airship to explore a lost world on a plateau in Venezuela and then bring back the bones of fantastic creatures previously unknown to man. When his discoveries are accused of being faked, he flies off enraged to South America again, vowing to bring back living creatures to prove his claims.
Nothing is heard from him for years. Ellie and Carl (Edward Asner) grow up, have a courtship, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together and grow old. This process is silent, except for music (the elder Ellie doesn't even have a voice credit). It's shown by Docter in a lovely sequence, without dialogue, that deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation. The lovebirds save their loose change in a gallon jug intended to finance their trip to the legendary Paradise Falls, but real life gets in the way: flat tires, home repairs, medical bills. Then they make a heartbreaking discovery. This interlude is poetic and touching.
The focus of the film is on Carl's life after Ellie. He becomes a recluse, holds out against the world, keeps his home as a memorial, talks to the absent Ellie. One day he decides to pack up and fly away -- literally. Having worked all his life as a balloon man, he has the equipment on hand to suspend the house from countless helium-filled balloons and fulfill his dream of seeking Paradise Falls. What he wasn't counting on was an inadvertent stowaway, Russell (Jordan Nagai), a dutiful Wilderness Explorer Scout, who looks Asian American.
What they find at Paradise Falls and what happens there I will not say. But I will describe Charles Muntz's gigantic airship that is hovering there. It's a triumph of design, and perhaps owes its inspiration, though not its appearance, to Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky." The exterior is nothing special: a really big zeppelin. But the interior is one of those movie spaces you have the feeling you'll remember.
With vast inside spaces, the airship is outfitted like a great ocean liner from the golden age, with a stately dining room, long corridors, a display space rivaling the Natural History Museum and an attic spacious enough to harbor fighter planes. Muntz, who must be a centenarian by now, is hale, hearty and mean, his solitary life shared only by robotic dogs.
The adventures on the jungle plateau are satisfying in a Mummy/ Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones sort of way. But they aren't the whole point of the film. This isn't a movie like "Monsters vs. Aliens," which is mostly just frenetic action. There are stakes here, and personalities involved, and two old men battling for meaning in their lives. And a kid who, for once, isn't smarter than all the adults. And a loyal dog. And an animal sidekick. And always that house and those balloons.
Posts: 27164 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
A very positive review from David Edelstein in NEW YORK MAGAZINE...
Pixar’s Up is a small charmer with the studio’s patented brand of cunning: Shock us with an inconsolable woe (predator eats fish’s wife and kids; a trash-heap Earth is depopulated save for a robot whose idea of culture is Hello, Dolly!); then gradually introduce sentiment, riotous chases, and a rousing cliff-hanger. Works for me! If we forgive the more conventional second half of Wall-E (and not everyone does), it’s because we’re grateful; we’re unaccustomed to such devastation in mainstream animation. We’re certainly devastated by the overture to Up, which centers on a loving couple unable to conceive or to live out the spirit of adventure that brought them together as bright-eyed children—then closes with aging and terminal illness. The elderly widower protagonist, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), assaults a contractor and elicits actual blood—blood in a cartoon!—and is sentenced to sell his beloved house and finish his days in a retirement facility. When he rips said house from its moorings with the aid of an immense, tutti-frutti bouquet of helium balloons and hightails it for a South American waterfall—the dream destination of his wife—our sad hearts surge.
Directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson are savvy tricksters. The first half of Up is all demented free association, with a dream logic both baffling and hilarious. The second half is outlandish but formulaic: Jules Verne melodrama with a Captain Nemo–like obsessive (Christopher Plummer at his most plangently sinister), plus talking dogs, plus a needy, fatherless adolescent. In search of a merit badge for assisting the elderly, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), a roly-poly Asian-American wilderness explorer, gets caught on the porch when the house lifts off, then irritates the old man with his chatter. We know that Fredricksen will become a surrogate dad, but Asner has perfected this growly persona: He will turn out to have a tender heart, but it will never be on his sleeve.
The look of Up is a world away from Pixar’s usual CGI intricacies—simple in a way that only artists with a genius for complexity can achieve. The characters are like wittier Cabbage Patch dolls. Has there ever been a human hero as off-putting yet accessible as Fredricksen, with his big square head and big square glasses and big round nose? The geometry is so basic, the impact so startling. Russell, his tiny eyes nestled in a blob of a face, must be the least immediately lovable of animated tykes. But he won me over. As in other Pixar films, the relative immobility of the features dries out the sentimentality and draws us in. The movement from inexpressiveness to vulnerability is inexorable.
By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons—bunched into the shape of one giant balloon—are as pluckable as grapes. The dogfight with canine pilots would have brought a salute from the late Charles M. Schulz. A mammoth, multicolored bird with an uncanny resemblance to the monster of the fifties sci-fi picture The Giant Claw sticks its beak into people’s faces and emits a flabbergasting croak: You can almost feel the air.
Complaints? Once Fredricksen’s wife, Ellie, passes away, there are no women characters—but Pixar has always been a boys’ universe. (More’s the pity: Girls like toys, too, and Coraline demonstrated the fertility of female escape fantasies.) Otherwise, the movie is practically a metaphor for Pixar’s storytelling: down, down, down; up, up, Up.
Posts: 27164 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
By Robert Wilonsky Tuesday, May 26th 2009 at 3:33pm
First of all, Up is not a movie about a cranky old coot who, with the help of a roly-poly Boy Scout, finds his inner child during a series of magical adventures experienced from the front porch of a dilapidated manse held aloft by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Such, of course, is the perception advanced by promotional materials, which sell short the latest Pixar picture, the first American animated offering ever to open le Festival de Cannes.
That is not to fault the trailer, loaded with pretty pictures and pratfalls intended to woo the wee ones. But it doesn't prepare you for the emotional punch of Up's first few minutes, when it presents the most heartfelt—the most sincere—love story in recent memory: the love between a boy and a girl, who become a man and a woman, who become a husband and a wife, who become a widower and a memory that haunts the rest of what follows. The first 10 minutes of Up are flawless; the final 80 minutes, close enough. (Though, note this: Do not see Up in 3-D. It's inessential to the tale and altogether distracting.)
The movie begins in a theater, with young Carl Fredricksen, through aviator goggles, reveling in the black-and-white newsreel adventures of the thrill-seeking Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer), for whom "Adventure is out there!" Through happenstance, little Carl (voiced, barely, by Jeremy Leary) soon meets fellow traveler Ellie (Elie Docter), and, with her, sets out on an adventure that will last the rest of his life—a journey that includes crushing blows (Ellie can't have children) and modest highs (the simple joy of renovating a decaying house till it becomes a Technicolor dream home). The would-be world travelers stay at home till Ellie's final breath, restless but content just to be with each other—in other words, Revolutionary Road, but with love. Had Up ended after those first few minutes, that would have been enough for some; at a recent preview screening, you could hear the adults sniffle. But behind me, a little girl asked her grandfather with great apprehension, "Is that the end of the movie?" She clearly hoped not.
Rest assured, it gets funny. And it's thrilling, too, as the third act takes place almost entirely in the sky, atop the mammoth zeppelin piloted by Muntz, who, as it turns out, has been in self-exile in South America, searching for a mythical bird whose existence he's been trying to prove for decades at the expense of his sanity.
But despite its title, Up is decidedly earthbound: The elderly Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) spends almost the entire movie schlepping his house across the South American landscape his wife had always hoped to visit. Carl is literally tethered to a memory, an anchor with a garden hose wrapped around his torso to keep his home from floating away. And he's kept company by an accidental intruder: Russell (Jordan Nagai), an even more awkward version of the youthful Carl. The two are meant for each other: the husband without a wife, the son without a father, each in desperate need of companionship and adventure lest they disappear.
Perhaps by now, all of this sounds so unbearably sad and undeniably grown-up, but only because it is. Pixar movies have been moving in this direction for years—adult animation sprinkled with just enough shenanigans to entertain the kids while we get our weep on. Consider the protagonists: adults stuck in the middle and on their way further down, but trying like hell to claw back up. Monsters, Inc., directed by Up co-director Pete Docter, was about mid-level drones sick of their jobs; The Incredibles, superheroes sick of suburban mediocrity; Ratatouille, a rat escaping the filthy sewer for a five-star kitchen. To that estimable lot add Carl, who waited till he was alone and at the end of his life to discover how much living was left to be done.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: pacinofan,
Posts: 27164 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures Carl Fredericksen checking out some new neighbors in “Up.”
May 29, 2009 The House That Soared
By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: May 29, 2009
In its opening stretch the new Pixar movie “Up” flies high, borne aloft by a sense of creative flight and a flawlessly realized love story. Its on-screen and unlikely escape artist is Carl Fredricksen, a widower and former balloon salesman with a square head and a round nose that looks ready for honking. Voiced with appreciable impatience by Ed Asner, Carl isn’t your typical American animated hero. He’s 78, for starters, and the years have taken their toll on his lugubrious body and spirit, both of which seem solidly tethered to the ground. Even the two corners of his mouth point straight down. It’s as if he were sagging into the earth.
Eventually a bouquet of balloons sends Carl and his house soaring into the sky, where they go up, up and away and off to an adventure in South America with a portly child, some talking (and snarling and gourmet-cooking) dogs and an unexpected villain. Though the initial images of flight are wonderfully rendered — the house shudders and creaks and splinters and groans as it’s ripped from its foundation by the balloons — the movie remains bound by convention, despite even its modest 3-D depth. This has become the Pixar way. Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art and the bottom line.
In “Up” that divide is evident between the early scenes, which tell Carl’s story with extraordinary tenderness and brilliant narrative economy, and the later scenes of him as a geriatric action hero. The movie opens with the young Carl enthusing over black-and-white newsreel images of his hero, a world-famous aviator and explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Shortly thereafter, Carl meets Ellie, a plucky, would-be adventurer who, a few edits later, becomes his beloved wife, an adult relationship that the director Pete Docter brilliantly compresses into some four wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment and grow happily old side by side. Like the opener of “Wall-E” and the critic’s Proustian reminiscence of childhood in “Ratatouille,” this is filmmaking at its purest.
The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter and the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are looking back to the silent era, as Andrew Stanton did with the Chaplinesque start to “Wall-E.” Even so, partly because “Up” includes a newsreel interlude, its marriage sequence also brings to mind the breakfast table in “Citizen Kane.” In this justly famous (talking) montage, Orson Welles shows the collapse of a marriage over a number of years through a series of images of Kane and his first wife seated across from each other at breakfast, another portrait of a marriage in miniature. As in their finest work, the Pixar filmmakers have created thrilling cinema simply by rifling through its history.
Those thrills begin to peter out after the boy, Russell (Jordan Nagai), inadvertently hitches a ride with Carl, forcing the old man to assume increasingly grandfatherly duties. But before that happens there are glories to savor, notably the scenes of Carl — having decided to head off on the kind of adventure Ellie and he always postponed — taking to the air. When the multihued balloons burst through the top of his wooden house it’s as if a thousand gloriously unfettered thoughts had bloomed above his similarly squared head. Especially lovely is the image of a little girl jumping in giddy delight as the house rises in front of her large picture window, the sunlight through the balloons daubing her room with bright color.
In time Carl and Russell, an irritant whose Botero proportions recall those of the human dirigibles in “Wall-E,” float to South America where they, the house and the movie come down to earth. Though Mr. Docter’s visual imagination shows no signs of strain here — the image of Carl stubbornly pulling his house, now tethered to his torso, could have come out of the illustrated Freud — the story grows progressively more formulaic. And cuter. Carl comes face to face with his childhood hero, Muntz, an eccentric with the dashing looks and frenetic energy of a younger Kirk Douglas. Muntz lives with a legion of talking dogs with which he has been hunting a rare bird whose gaudy plumage echoes the palette of Carl’s balloons.
The talking dogs are certainly a hoot, including the slobbering yellow furball Dug and a squeaky-voiced Doberman, Alpha (both Mr. Peterson), not to mention the dog in the kitchen and the one that pops open the Champagne. And there’s something to be said about the revelation that heroes might not be what you imagined, particularly in a children’s movie and particularly one released by Disney. (Muntz seems partly inspired by Charles Lindbergh at his most heroic and otherwise.) But much like Russell, the little boy with father problems, and much like Dug, the dog with master issues, the story starts to feel ingratiating enough to warrant a kick. O.K., O.K., not a kick, just some gently expressed regret.
WHY, dear god, WHY did the times assign 'UP' to Manohla Dargis????? That woman clearly has no soul or heart. She's the type of critic that the academy needs to justify why time and time again Pixar masterpieces never get nominated for best picture. 'BANAL story choices'!!!?? My goodness, if Pixar is making movies with banal story lines, i really don't want to know what she thinks of the rest of the crap thats playing in theaters. I really want to know what other critics think of her. A O Scott or Stephen Holden should have reviewed this movie and given this movie more of the due respect that it deserves.
A **** out of **** review from Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE...
A grumpy old coot, a chubby kid and a house hoisted by helium balloons — if you're thinking that Up sounds like a shortcut to sugar shock, snap out of it. Pandering to ninnies is not on the agenda for this latest landmark in Pixar animation. With Pete Docter and Bob Peterson sharing the directing and writing, Up is a breathtaking ride into the realm of pure imagination. Up shames the pap that now passes for family entertainment (yes, Night at the Museum 2, I'm talking to you).
You can feel balls-out creativity whooshing through every frame. Darkness and its cousin loss also intrude, as they do in Pixar's best films (The Incredibles, WALL-E, Finding Nemo). Up sees the world as real, full of life and pain. Some theaters are showing Up in 3-D, which dims the color a bit, but the dimensions that count are in the movie's mind and heart. The opening sequence is touched by genius. A young Depression-era boy named Carl goes to the movies and watches a newsreel about Charles Muntz (a complex portrait in voice by the great Christopher Plummer), an explorer who takes off for South America in a dirigible to track a giant bird at Paradise Falls. Quiet Carl wants to explore as well. He meets an exciting, motor-mouthed girl, Ellie, who shares his feelings. They grow up, marry and grow old without fulfilling their dreams of children or adventure. This near-silent prelude is Pixar perfection. Up achieves literal liftoff when the widowed Carl (eloquently growled by Ed Asner) takes the balloons he used to sell pre-retirement, ties them to his house and takes off for Paradise Falls. He doesn't know he has a stowaway, eight-year-old Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai). And he doesn't know the perils of his journey will include Muntz's pack of attack dogs with electronic collars that enable them to talk.
The movie is wonderfully funny and touching (props to the gawky hero of a bird Russell names Kevin), but what's really exhilarating are the risks it takes, all set to Michael Giacchino's ardent, award-caliber score. Up may be the first animated kiddie crowd-pleaser to feature dentures and an hommage to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, as old man and boy drag a house and the burden of dreams through the jungle. Up works miracles. Just sit back and watch it fly.
Posts: 27164 | Location: Phoenix, AZ | Registered: February 02, 2003
I really liked "Up", but I definitely see what Dargis is talking about. At least in terms of this particular film. I, myself, thought the film was a touch too conventional in sections, and came close to outright pandering to kids in other sections. Pixar has done wonderful things for storytelling in mainstream Hollywood that I have just developed very high standards for them. I don't think the plot of this movie was as banal as "Cars", but I definitely felt it trying to pull that way. It was just enough for me to think "Up" was good, but not as great as Pixar's best.
All that said, I did really like the movie. I saw it in 2D, so I can't comment on any of the 3D effects. It is beautifully animated. Pixar has developed a wonderful way with imagery and symbolism. The silent and near silent sections of this film may be the best scenes in it. The opening montage of Carl and Ellie's life together is gorgeous. I loved the image of the house floating away. I also loved the image of Carl relentlessly pulling that house across those South American landscapes. The scene of the floating house sheltering the group from a rain storm was great, too.
The movie is really funny. The initial talking dog scenes I liked very much. I just think the device was a bit overused.
I really loved the score, so I want to mention that. Lovely music. Perfectly fits the mood of every scene.
Oh, and the short that runs before it, "Partly Cloudy" is very good. I really liked it.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: LadyHathor25,
My first impressions were that there were stunning visuals and voiceover work done (loved Ed Asner here and all of the sections with the balloons and the dogs), but this was a much more melancholy film than I was expecting going in. It's effective and makes the ending resonate so greatly, but I was a bit surprised that the film went to some of the places that it ended up going. This wasn't as strong a film as "WALL-E" was, but it's another stellar entry to the Pixar canon, and it's the kind of film that could run away with the Animated Oscar win.
Congratulations, Primetime Emmy Winners!
Comedy Series: 30 ROCK Drama Series: MAD MEN Lead Actor in a Comedy Series: Alec Baldwin, 30 ROCK Lead Actress in a Comedy Series: Toni Collette, UNITED STATES OF TARA Lead Actor in a Drama Series: Bryan Cranston, BREAKING BAD Lead Actress in a Drama Series: Glenn Close, DAMAGES Guest Actress in a Comedy Series: Tina Fey, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE Guest Actress in a Drama Series: Ellen Burstyn, LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT
Posts: 24740 | Location: North Carolina, USA | Registered: April 11, 2005
So, anyone who has seen this in 3D, how dark/muddy is it? The 2D rendering was beautiful. I am thinking of going to see it in 3D tomorrow or Monday. I'd really love to get a look at the depth of the scenes when they are rendered in 3D. But, I am not looking forward to sacrificing the beautiful color.
Up is my favorite film of the year thus far. I loved this movie. Not only was it beautiful to look at, with eye-popping colours, but it was exciting, moving, and joyful to the core.
Posts: 13912 | Location: canada | Registered: December 22, 2005
