Let's stop congratulating Pixar

Rating: 7/10 (3 June 2009)

'Up's' plot-line plays with the Pixar films' cross-generational appeal by having an oldster and a kid as its main characters. It's a buddy picture about the voyage of Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), a 78-year-old widower, and Russell (Jordan Ngai), a chubby eight-year-old Asian "Wilderness Explorer" who wants to earn an "assisting the elderly" badge. The movie "teaches" us that we can still realize our life-long deferred dream of exploring South American wilderness if we can just attach thousands of helium balloons to our house and sail away. It's hard to say if up to then Frederickson's life has been fulfillment or disappointment. His wife Ellie (Elie Docter) was a childhood playmate who dreamed of emulating an explorer named Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who has found a prehistoric bird in South America's Paradise Falls plateau. They never go very far. Ellie, alas, can't have children. One day when they're both in their senior years she falls down and shortly thereafter dies. Fredrickson has had a career as a balloon salesman.
The film sketches in the couple's life as sweetness and smiles, yet hints at a world of disappointment symbolized by Ellie's "adventure" scrapbook, which was never filled. Poor old Fredericksen won't move to a retirement home even though his little house is now surrounded by a vast loud construction zone. The demeaning practicalities of aging are depicted as something to escape from -- magically. When Fredericksen strikes an agent of the contractors and gets branded as a public menace he's somehow legally mandated to the old folks' home: this is the moment when he flies away, taking his house with him, with Russell a stowaway.
There's no doubt about the exhilaration of an aerial escape, or the charm of the bond that develops between the old man and his dutiful, plucky little sidekick. But Up gets into deep trouble wit the arrival of the dogs, dozens of them, with electronic flashing collars that enable them to talk in squeaky (or sometimes deep) voices, in various languages according to what button you push. Forgive me, but I didn't buy it, and I just didn't see the need. Mr. Fredericksen is sold to us initially as a pretty feeble old man and so the strength and vigor he develops in South America is hard to accept. There's something to be said for a story that ends with the awarding of an explorer scout patch for assisting the elderly. All Russell really wanted to do was help the old man across the street, -- or even just across his lawn.
I want to love Pixar films. Their animated features have moved from strength to strength. 'The Incredibles' was energetic and smart, 'Ratatouille' was witty and sophisticated, and 'WALL·E' was
transcendent and moving. Alas, Up does not live up to that standard.
The house of Pixar has been declared triumphant in the field. Denby of The New Yorker heralds Pixar animations as examples of "moral fable" and damns the old Disney ones as mere "psychological fables" marked by "cloyingness" and "malevolent overtones." Well, Up is full of cloyingness and weirdness, and the latter part of its adventure has its fair share of malevolence. Up is a hugely overblown fantasy whose point is lost in endless violations of the laws of biology and physics. Pixar has its ups and downs, features different writers and directors, and to typecast them is dubious. What they have in common is a technology and a look. The look is mainstream, as is the sensibility. If you want something more artistically or intellectually adventurous, you'll go to French animations like 'Persepolis' or 'Fantastic Planet' or F'ear(s) of the Dark;' 'The Triplets of Bellville' blows away the similarly dark American film 'Coraline.' Eastern European animations have a fresher look. The world of Japanese anime is rich, fantastic, and frequently very adult or sexual; it seems to capture the original, fantasmagoric world of comic books better than American comic-based films like the Batman franchise. Likewise graphic novel films like 'Frank Miller's Sin City' go far beyond the tame confines of Pixar or Disney. An adult animation like 'Waltz with Bashir' is in another league.
It's a bad start for 'Up' and not a step in the direction of technical or artistic innovation if you're forced, as you may be, to watch 'Up' in 3-D. The glasses, on top of your own, weigh upon and pinch your nose and the dimmed images with the planar levels they create are as flat and fake-looking as your grandmother's stereopticon slides. This Fifties movie gimmick with its chintzy throwaway plastic specs is unconvincingly heralded as the great new technology. It didn't do much for the creepy 'Coraline,' the fascistic 'U2/3D,' still less for the slipshod 'Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience,' and it only detracted from Zemeckis' watchable 'Beowulf.' 3-D is supposed to look incredibly real, but even granting this dubious claim, why use it for 'Up,' which flaunts its unreality? Its digital figures are like painted toys. Its Paradise Falls looks unabashedly like paper-mâché rocks and fake foam. The Pixar images pop out at you without the effect of 3-D imaging, the colors are brighter, and the experience is more absorbing. Why not let us use our own imaginations?
There's some thrill of adventure in this movie, and certainly the titillation of swooping flights and dives through space, as well as the time-honored animation scare of teetering on a precipice, and going into free fall only to be magically saved. But this, compared to the best Pixar films, gets lost in its gimmicks at the cost of a meaningful tale. Of course a travel yarn is just one thing after another anyway, and there's' no harm in an adventure with the moral of a good deed attacked to it. But that's just what it is, though: attached. And how much richer were the worlds of 'WALL·E,' 'Ratatouille,' and 'The Incredibles'! 'Up' has less to offer to adults than they did.