A lovely addition to Pixar's franchise

Rating: 8/10 (28 October 2009)

When I saw the first clip of this movie on the WALL-E DVD, my first impression was, this is crazy, seeing a house rising into the sky by a lot of balloons! I liked the idea of using an old man as the main character, from the moment he said "afternoon" in the clip, it felt heart warming. When I first heard about the plot, everything fell into place, and the message behind the house was beautiful. I did have another reservation with the relationship between the old man Carl and the wilderness explorer, Russell, but when I went to see it, nearly everything worked.
The beginning is definitely one of the best parts of the film, the montage we see on Carl and Ellie's time together was a joy to watch, right through to the end, and it was the first time a film brought a tear to my eye at so early a stage of the plot. As I've already said the message of freedom and being able to do the thing you always want to do in your whole life, was beautifully shown through the flying house. What I was concerned about before hand was the relationship between Carl and Russell. From seeing later clips of the film, I was worried that the film was going to be hampered down by "the main character and his sidekick" gags, especially when you add in a bird that won't go away, and a witless dog. Yet the film doesn't fall into that trap, yes there are still sidekick gags, but the creators don't overdo it. What's more, in a way the characters, Russell, Kevin and Dug, are not like the usual dumb sidekicks you get in any short TV cartoons, they're natural sidekicks. Russell for instance is the kind of kid with curiosity and the idea that everything is a game, which would lead to trouble. There are action sequences in this film that takes you on a helter-skelter of a ride, and when I left the cinema I felt I had a great time. To anyone, this film would seem to be defying the laws of science, and it's not just because of a flying house. Yet, I didn't care about this because this is a children's film! The gags were great, yet there was one on the dogs voices which, though it was hilarious, I felt was a bit camp for Pixar's standards.
The Mis-en-scene was beautiful. Obviously the two contrasting settings in this film are the city and the paradise falls. Paradise Falls is of course the main attraction and we see a ray of colours from the natural setting, compared to the grey and organised city. The music meanwhile was charming.
From other reviews, I heard that the 3D graphics didn't show anything amazing. For me I didn't think it was bad. It definitely didn't pop out of the screen, but I thought it was better than Coraline. I found that the airborne objects, like the house, seemed to stand out more and I enjoyed it There were however a few problems I had with this film. Firstly, there is the matter of the self-improvement in this film. In many of their other films, Pixar has used more than one self-improvement. In WALL-E for example, as well as the robots want for love, there was the human's self-improvement to find their humanity and return to earth, which fitted in nicely. In this film, it was clear that Russell had a self – improvement to progress in life, namely to become a senior in the wilderness explorers. However, once we got to Paradise falls, the creators seemed to let this self – improvement sit, and although there were moments, such as the time when we hear Russell talk about his relationship with his father with Carl, there weren't many signs of development. Once you add up the sidekick gags and the helter-skelter action sequences, they seemed to take over the whole plot. We only return to the self-improvement near the end, and at that stage, Russell had improved by then. I enjoyed watching Carl improve, yet it didn't balance with Russell's improvement, along with the many things that was going on. Also, there weren't many twists to the plot. The villain was defeated (so no nod to "Ratatouille"), and it was predictable what the dilemma in the second half was going to be (so no nod to "WALL-E"). In the end the plot was just the usual plot line you get in any normal film. Also, after seeing the last three films, I was looking forward to a song in the ending credits, and was disappointed when that didn't happen Despite these, the ending for Carl was lovely, and in essence, the things that make Pixar's films great are there. The film didn't bowl me over like "WALL-E", but I found it to be a charming film.