Air of Dreams...

Rating: 9/10 (30 June 2016)

I see some spiritual connections between Pete Docter's "Up" and "Field of Dreams", both about men who missed opportunities for reality's sake before embarking in fantastic eye-opening experiences and coming to terms with their past. And both have this daringness of scripts starting with real people living real situations, yet never shaking our belief that the impossible can happen, former baseball players coming from heaven or hundreds and hundreds of colored balloons taking a house to the most remote place of the world, somewhere in South America.
But there's more in "Up" than the adventure of a cranky old man and a little kid; by the time, the house takes off, literally, we already handled more emotionality than all the previous Pixar movies put together, and this is what makes this sight so rewarding, so relieving after the unforgettable prologue. Indeed, if there is one sequence from 2009 that became an instant classic, and you better believe it will still be in twenty years, it's the magnificent marital-life montage sequence, sublimated by Michael Giacchino's Oscar-winning score. It all starts with Carl as a little bespectacled boy idolizing adventurer Charles Muntz and dreaming to join him in the Lost Word to admire the Paradise Falls. On his way home, he meets Ellie, a free-spirited little girl who talks for two, the two kids share the same dreams.
And the magic of "Up" is to convey messages through simple visuals, Carl meets Ellie when losing his balloon, he gets to the hospital by trying to get it, she then sends it back with a little gift tied to it, so Carl and Ellie's love story is constantly associated with balloons, and Carl's job as a balloon vendor might be the humblest way to emulate his hero's zeppelin. So Carl and Ellie get married and from the clouds they gaze at, they form exotic creatures, symbols of their escapist dreams. Reality slowly fades in and starts to inspire such forms as toddlers, unfortunately, the couple can't. Then they decide to save money for their travel, putting nickels and dimes in a jar, but life always find a way: a flat tire, a roof destruction, ordinary hazards postpone then erase the dream. Only love hasn't been tarnished by the passing of time, but the tragedy of such couples is that one ought to live some time. So Ellie finally dies, leaving Carl alone with his memories their house.
This is a marvel of storytelling, no words or lyrics, only a musical theme to complete a sequence whose timeless and universal appeal is comparable to the ending of "City Lights", because I refuse to believe there's anyone in this world who can't relate to Carl and Ellie, and even if you watched the scene with cynicism-tainted glasses and thought their life was boring, in a later scene, the little kid says something like "funny how we remember the most boring stuff". This line sums up everything, Carl had a happy life with Ellie, and it's all up to him to make the rest of his life as happy. I think it was John Lennon who said that life was what happened to us while we're busy making plans, well this totally applies to Carl, certainly one of the most fascinating characters of Pixar, I want to say, if only for the fact that he's an old man, and that the villain (voiced by Christopher Plummer) is even older.
Their age is important because the two men have one thing in common, they're prisoners of their past, naturally each one finds a different way to fight the demons. Carl's present was Ellie, once she was dead, he couldn't connect with anything related to his time, only living in a world of memories and dusty pictures, even keeping the little house from the estate investors who want to buy him out. Carl categorically refuses until the day he hits a worker and then is forced to put in retirement home, losing his only remaining link with the past. Carl is left with no other choice than project himself into the future and what more glorious than the one he always prepared with Ellie. So, using all the balloons he could collect during years of services, he takes his house to the air.
The movie gets a bit more conventional once the house picks off, featuring some magnificent locations, high mountains with oddly flat summits, oddly shaped rocks and oddly colored creatures, towering over the tropical jungles, so high and so remote that no human ever set the foot there. And beyond the escapism, there is this eternal love story that drives Carl, and there's the little kid, an Asian overweight scout who starts like a comic relief until you see he has a few things in common with Carl besides the fact that both act realistically, according to their age. Russell's dream is to get the 'Assist the Elderly' badge and to spend more time with his Dad, the fact that he calls his mother by her first name might be a hint that he's an adopted orphan. Russell is like the total opposite of Carl, it's the absence of love that makes his banal dream impossible, while Carl had all the love he needed and that's what made his extraordinary dream possible.
Carl and Russell's journey isn't devoid of humor, an exotic bird and a bunch of robotic dogs provide some laughs, but the story ultimately works because we genuinely care for the characters. There aren't many but that allows them to have more realism, texture and personality than any other standard animated character. And this is integral to the story's appeal as it invites us to reconsider our life and what we call failures, to make us forgive our mistakes and embrace the future with more optimism, and as "Up"'s ending suggests, the ground can be as a great field of dreams as the air.