All You Need Is Love

Rating: 10/10 (19 August 2009)

By Aaron Dumont **** (out of 4) Pixar's Up is stunning and delightful. But what makes it so unique? It's a Pixar creation with disappointment, loneliness, regret, personal reconciliation and crushed ambition, but that's not what makes UP transcend entertainment to artistry--from child's play to vivid, mature reverie. In this movie, characters do let down others, get let down, die and spill blood. They cry, they lose hope, realtions are disintegrated, passions and goals unfulfilled. However, with all the hyperreal color, theatrics, and grace of it all, this movie works on two different volumes at once--both a life truly lived, as well as a life truly dreamt, which is a marvelous feat all by itself.
UP has beauty, redemption and a sense of simplicity and humor in it, while still remaining earthy and pure in its vision and splendor. In a compassionate homage of past classic movies and fairy tales, UP begins as an episodic series of Chaplinesque vignettes--from the opening, a short movie that evokes the beginning of Citizen Kane, UP establishes what it sets to be--a whole spectrum of moods, wonders and experiences from the first embrace of childhood to the final acceptance of weariness and grief.
As a young child, the main character Carl watches a short movie (as I had described earlier) about his hero and banal inspiration Charles Muntz, an aviator and explorer. He soon meets a young girl who shares his beloved obsession, and their childhood friendship soon turns into a lifelong marriage. They develop a dream to sail to where their idol Muntz had flown off to, never to return--Paradise Falls--but before they save up the money to do so, Carl's wife dies from a terminal illness, leaving with her the couple's lifelong goal.
Most of you probably know the rest. Carl ties thousands of balloons to his house, flies it up into the air, and a young boy accidentally gets swept on board. Their adventure begins. The beauty of the flying scenes are magnificent, and the pastoral range of light and shapes used here is more than merely impressive--it's a semi-psychedelic kind of life-affirming.
Apart from the technical brilliance, what can also be found here is profundity, humanity and emotion. This duo (Carl and the young boy) come across a now-elderly Muntz as well as several his several talking guard dog, which provide quirkiness a-la-Duck Soup (or perhaps Chaplin?)--comedy and craft in the most feverishly impassioned and feistily engrossing of the term. The two split up, after a series of mishaps and disagreements, in a turn for loneliness and solemnity, and in a climactic fight scene, find and embrace each other again, but not before depending on one another, helping each other, and saving each others lives in suspense and moving sleflessness. In fact, in the simple, humble ending, perhaps one of the most touching of endings, the formerly recluse and grumpy Carl makes himself as a father figure to his young companion.
UP is truly a wonder. It is capsule of sorts - it holds love, optimism, innocence and freedom in a special, vibrant place, glowing, blossoming and swirling around, floating through scenes and glowing as beautifully and brilliantly as birth. Even during the worst of times, in fact. UP has all the passion, exuberance and emotion of any great art--animated or not--with multifaceted flares of hallucinogenic sights, waking dream textures, reservoirs of poetry and magnificent vision, and the movie's humanistic grandeur and dignity makes it all the more lovably important.
UP, throughout all the adventures and feelings, achieves what many other movies couldn't even dream of doing - it creates a world on its own, one both personal and universal.
It's magic. Deep, true magic.