Up, what's.

I just finished watching Up again. It's a story about seeing your dreams become real. The last image we see is the wife's house over the waterfall, befoer a sweet "and then this happened" to accompanying the other wise boring (for kids) credits.

The movie ends when the story has finished being told, which is at two points in this movie. The first is when we see the old man as the old man he is for the main of the movie, once we've been shown his life from childhood to marriage to burying his wife. Their little story is very intimate, and very one sided as he says rather two words during the whole scene, and nothing else whenever he's rememebring his wife.

The movie sadly degenerates into action once the plot has been delivered and everyone's "hopes and dreams" communicated. It follows the beautifully well written, call and answer style of a good movie, but it confuses me as to why there is so very much attention and love put into the start of our story if the juice of that effort is more like %5 of the rest of the story.

We see an old man who wants to grant his deceased wife's wish. He meets a childboy who wants to go on a real adventure. Who are confronted by an established adventurer, torn from the spotlight as a wrongful fraud. The relation between the characters, taken from Frank's pov (that's the old man's name, right?) are apparent but not immediate.

Russell is the child adventurer inside Frank himself. The old baron who's trying to reclaim his dignity is the angry old man Frank could have become, hellbent on his now obsessive target.

The graphics and visual, as always, are perfect and stunning and pay an interesting mix of attention to realism. Russell's face is smooth and lucid, like a chubby childs as he is. Though we see Frank's ears are practically pentagonal. What do you make of that? During the abduction scene we see a backlit Russell silhouetted against the screen, yet his ears are a translucent red, as the powerful searchlights permeate through his skin - again this fantastic depth of realism with very realistic character, essentially blood puppets.

The first time I saw Up at the movies I enjoyed the experience, but felt as though the movie was another "mass production" for having all the same hijinks of a classic Disney/Pixar make. Too comfortable, no new ground really broken. You may decide to give credit for the use of blood in the movie (maybe Bambi has also used visual violence and the dead zebra's cut off leg in Lion King) but that's a minor step of newground compared to what I'm meaning.

The same can be said of Quentin Tarantino's newest Inglourious Basterds, though with QT it feels much more like it's just "QT at the movies again." It's not that bad with Up, it just feels as though they've found a formula and have stopped working on it.

It's great for the kids, and adults will like it as well, but it gets mean and the adventure is, if you can't believe in houses flying thanks to balloons, unbelievable. This is made with kids primarily in mind however, so don't it, or yourself, so seriously.

The Incredibles and Toy Story are still my top choices for Disney/Pixar's best movies, while Up sits in the top 3 definately. You may feel Wall-E deserves a mention, and I'd agree it gets a top 5 spot but the most of Wall-E was an experiment in making dialogue-poor robots emotionally receptive to the audience, which they did astonishingly well. I'm not a tree hugger nor do I hate them, but the environmental message attached to Wall-E made a solid block of "Real world" for the audience to digest, which I'm not sure was received well. It teaches a good lesson to those watching, but at a fantastic cost to an amazingly fantastic sci-fi world with very emotional robots - real world reminder.

Up is a great movie and definately another notch in Disney/Pixar's belt for another CG classic, and it'll be love forever like most of Disney's movies. (Mulan, we're sorry but the doors on your left) Enjoyable, sweet, adventuring and grounded with real world sentiments and lessons. Considering how very much they could've screwed this up, they've gone a shimmering colourful job.

Squirrels!!