film, eyeballs, brain

If there’s anything a little disappointing — other than my friend Luna’s legitimate complaint about the lack of girls, which was perhaps the reason why my daughter wasn’t interested in seeing it again — it’s that Up doesn’t quite fulfill the promise of its title. (Is it still a preposition if the word stands alone? A direction, a state of mind?) I think it must have been Noel Vera who has pointed out (and I paraphrase here) that Hayao Miyazaki is the preeminent director of flight in animated films; for a movie entitled Up, surely the flight sequences should be exhilarating, especially with all the colored balloons, but not even the film’s characters seem particularly thrilled in seeing the landscape below them. (Compare this, for instance, with that first moment when the young witch-in-training manages to control her broom for the first time in Kiki’s Delivery Service — or even that incredible conclusion of Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, with the boy floating over the rooftops of Paris — and you’ll see what I mean; Up‘s sense of wonder is reserved for other parts.)

But it’s a minor complaint compared to the wonderful, whittled-down simplicity (like its one-word title) of Up. The animation, despite its computer origins, looks fluid and organic — it’s a Pixar production, after all — and the voice acting (Ed Asner and Jordan Nagai) is top-notch. Written by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter, Up‘s similarities to Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (as my friend Sue nicely pointed out) — Asian boy and cranky old widower sitting on his porch befriend each other — end in the first fifteen minutes once the house takes flight over Emeryville and off to parts unknown (actually, Venezuela), and Up turns into an homage to Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World.

This is when we see Up‘s chief virtue, namely, its subtly hilarious absurdity. At first I couldn’t figure out exactly why it was so funny, when I realized its silliness was of a particular kind. It’s not the noisy gag-filled silliness of other Disney movies (Chicken Little comes to mind), but the understated sort you see in smart children’s books, where both writer and reader enter into an unspoken pact: yes, this is funny, but it will never be announced as such. (Honestly, I can’t tell you why a talking dog that says “Point!” is hilarious; just see it.) Like its 3D effects, Up doesn’t keep elbowing you in the ribs to tell you when to gasp or when to laugh. Its unreality isn’t labored; one of the most striking images in Up is that of the old man walking along a cliff and pulling his balloon-tethered house as it floats behind him. It’s a scene worthy of Miyazaki.

Other than its relative calm, the main difference between Up and many other mainstream American animated films is how the themes — of parenthood, of loss, of life itself as an adventure, both terrifying and sublime — are woven intelligently throughout the narrative. In other films — say, practically every animated film Dreamworks and latter-day Disney has put out — the lessons (and they’re almost always announced as such) would be an afterthought, lazily bookending the movie: Believe in yourself / Beauty is what’s inside / There’s no place like home.

In contrast, there’s something almost pure about Up, especially in contrast to the soulless children’s flicks that are nothing more than mere product advertisements — test-marketed to death, vetted by suits, written by committee, voiced by a dozen celebrities, and crammed with off-color jokes and pop-culture references that will sound dated once the movie arrives on DVD a few months later. (Okay, there’s one poop joke in Up, but it’s very cleverly handled because there’s an eager participant. You’ll just have to see it for yourself.)

Don’t get me wrong: the marketing synergy machine certainly worked overtime for Up. And at heart it’s still a fairly conventional film with all the trappings of the genre, with its goofy animal sidekicks and requisite action sequences. Quite frankly I’m puzzled why animated movies, regardless of the topic, seem compelled to end with elaborate action set pieces; it’s as if they don’t trust the material to deliver a spirited conclusion. Up certainly got along well without it, as the antagonist isn’t even introduced until well halfway into the movie. Either way, it’s well-executed here — I’ll just say that it involves Captain von Trapp, a zeppelin, and three dogs in biplanes — though it doesn’t quite have the rollercoaster verve of the bedroom-door assembly lines of Monsters Inc. (Docter’s previous film, from 2001), or the breakneck insanity of The Greatest Action Sequence In An Animated Film Ever (the ending of Nick Park’s The Wrong Trousers, of course).

Up isn’t quite as daring as the poetically bleak first half of Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E (whose story Docter also wrote, along with the two Toy Story movies), but there’s also a piercingly eloquent sense of loneliness they have in common. I was told later by three friends that they had cried twice while watching Up. I didn’t cry, but I could guess exactly when they wept: during two wordless sequences suffused with nostalgia, perhaps an hour apart but logically following from each other. In retrospect, those scenes might be a bit obvious, as the narrative literally pauses to allow this dramatization of the passage of time to unfold. The emotion is fully earned, though, in a subtle, unforced manner that characterizes the entire movie. (I point out, at the risk of spoilers, that there’s a third wordless sequence similar to the first two; it’s the same as in the end credits to Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’ Lilo & Stitch actually, but its meaning is different here.)

Up is a lovely little film, lighter than air, which I happily recommend. Plus any movie that puts in a giant plug for one of my favorite ice cream places (right down the road from me) is a good thing.

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