A sense of history

Rating: 8/10 (3 November 2009)

A lot of people have written about the humour, excitement, sweetness, depiction of love etc. etc. of this film, and with most of that I'd concur; I want to write about the element I haven't seen mentioned much, and which I perhaps enjoyed and was impressed by the most -- Pixar's homage to the spirit of the past, right down to the authentic style of the vocals in the 'period' song that plays at the end of the credits. (Not just a bit of distort and crackle to make it sound old -- if anything, that's overdone -- but the singing technique and orchestration are spot-on for a pre-war popular record. Wish I could say the same for the rhymes, but 'adventure' clearly isn't the easiest couplet to complete..!)
By having Carl as the principal character and his adventures triggered by his childhood fantasies, Pixar have very cleverly contrived to have their cake and eat it: to produce what is basically a 'Boys' Own' adventure full of lost jungles, unknown species, biplanes and giant airships, mad scientific gadgets and a reclusive genius -- something out of the "Eagle" magazine, right down to its action climax -- and yet to set it in what is supposedly the modern world of its juvenile audience. The 1931 newsreel with which the film opens is wonderful pastiche (and was that a visual reference to "King Kong", as adventurer Muntz prepares to reveal his latest discovery?), the two children and their games bring the period to life as the real existence of people just like us without feeling in any way anachronistic, and then the segment that follows demonstrates Pixar's effective use and command of an even earlier idiom -- the fluent story-telling of the *silent* film era.
Too much has been written already on the impact and poignancy of this wordless love-story for me to be able to add anything to its praise. I would agree with the reviewer who wrote that it is very rare for films of any kind to depict the married love of adults, let alone to do it in animation so sweetly as this.
But actually, the moment when tears came to my eyes was not during this segment at all, but the moment when the house takes off and Carl makes his defiant adventure/escape... (Shades of the Crimson Permanent Assurance!)
I found most of this film very enjoyable indeed, especially the retro adventure feel and the dog psychology. What actually undermined it for me was not the surrogate-family-bonding scenario, which would normally have been anathema to me but is handled convincingly here, but the handling of the villain. Interestingly, reading comments on the IMDb boards suggests not only that I am not alone in this, but that the film's creators themselves weren't very sure right up to a late stage in production what to do with him -- the result is that the character, who could have been intriguing, is simply dropped into one-dimensional mode and wasted.
I would have preferred a treatment more like the ending of "Ratatouille" (and would have preferred a beginning to "Ratatouille" more like this!; and for this idiosyncratic reason alone, which did significantly affect my enjoyment, I have rated it down one mark from the level of 9 (for "deeply moving and exciting") that it would otherwise have scored on my personal scale. Both films still score by my standards very highly.