Soaring Up

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2009)

When a slight misunderstanding threatens to force elderly Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner) into a retirement home, the wiley old coot decides to go for broke, attaching thousands of balloons to his house and floating off to the jungle wilds of South America. Trouble is, a little kid named Russell (Jordan Nagai) is also along for the ride, which doesn’t quite play out the way Carl intends it to. This Disney/Pixar instaclassic is a lot of fun, especially in 3D, with charming, realistic characters, sweeping vistas, and a straight-arrow message that’s neither muddled nor heavyhanded.
Now, you gotta know this upfront: I love 3D animated films. It’s not like the old days, where the makers would try so hard to make the 3D exciting and amazing that they forgot to make a movie behind the effects. What happens nowadays is that the creators write an awesome, fun movie and then toss dollops of 3D effects to accentuate the story, rather than distract from it. (Or, as sometimes would happen, detract from it.) So maybe I was an easy mark, but I thought Up was outstanding. Ed Asner, as the cranky old man who’s lost his zest for life, turns in a pitch-perfect performance that’s both endearing and curmudgeonly. Of course, the animation is so detailed that you can count the hairs on Carl’s chin as the days progress, but the Pixar gang did a great job in showing the various expressions on the faces of the human characters here, something I think they’ve been slow to develop well. (The toys in Toy Story, for example, looked great, but Sid the neighbor kid did not appear to be fully formed.) The story itself is an adventure on the order of Indiana Jones, if Indy were a septuagenarian with the physical prowess of an eggplant. The unlikely duo winds up in South America, all right, but they encounter more than just trees and rocks. Every animated film needs a villain, and here we get the luminous Christopher Plummer as a thought-dead old-time explorer who’s been holed up at the very spot Carl wishes to visit. Plummer does evil pretty well, I think, especially for a Canadian. (They’re kindly, peaceful folk, you see.) Compared with recent 3D movies, I’d put Up a little higher up than Monsters versus Aliens, but not much. The sweet ending, although expected, packs just as strong an emotional punch as it would if you couldn’t see it coming. And certainly the intended audience for this movie won’t care about nuances; the kids in the theater where I saw this raved about it, keeping in awed silence for much of the film - except when Big Fun Wonderful Things were happening, when they erupted with raucous jubilation.