Up gets my sky high rating

Rating: 9/10 (3 June 2009)

The best cinematic thing the Walt Disney Company has done in the past half century is tie in with Pixar, a group of brilliant animation filmmakers founded by John Lasseter who left Disney for Lucasfilm in the early eighties and Ed Catmull who was made the head the new company's digital imaging at that time under new corporate head, Steve Jobs. We all know of their extraordinary success. The films appear to just get better as the years roll by and fine writers are located and brought aboard.
UP is a quality peer of the best animated feature films ever made. However, somewhat unlike the first two Disney animated features, Snow White and Pinocchio. These two are as yet to be surpassed in enduring contentwhat the great director, Frank Capra, once told me, "Something to put in their pocket and take home with them." It's what I call spiritual content, that is, subtext that speaks to the soul.
Thus, unlike the first two classics made under the auspices of Walt Disney himself, however, UP is a bit light in its spiritual core and heavier on action and storytwo good attributes of all Pixar features, and in this case with strong sentiment and heartwarming scenes. However, this lack in formula always shortens the legs of all features, live action included.
Another fuzz-ball in the lens is the contemporary use of well known voices such as Ed Asner, who does a commendable job as the lead character in UP, Carl Fredricksen, but whose voice clearly kicks off real life images from the brain's memory bank which then conflict with the animated character's image on screen.
In 1978 while researching my first place national book festival prizewinner, The World of Animation, at the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, I interviewed several people that had worked with Disney in the mid to late 1930s and was also associated for some years with Shamus Culhane who worked on both of the first two Disney animated features.
As a brief sidebar, Jimmy (Shamus)Culhane's name was left out of the of Pinocchio credits because he quit Disney before that film was released in order to help (and in addition for an erroneous health assumption) the Fleischer brothers in Miami on their first two animated featurestwo films not so successful due to poor scripting but both features that had charm: Gulliver's Travels and Hoppity Goes to Town.
As for Shamus, most of the scene where Pinocchio sets out to school with an apple for the teacher and meets the fox and cat was animated primarily by Shamus.
Shamus and others who were there at the time of Snow White's production confirmed that the reason that Walt Disney used Adriana Casellotti's singing voice, totally unknown, instead of Deanna Durbin's or Judy Garland's in Snow White, for example, was primarily because of the image conflict that does occur with audiences when they hear a very well known voice speaking for an animated character with which we are trying to identify. Today nearly all (but not all) American animation studios use celebrity voices in contrast to the very early years. They also pay top dollar for these voices, a completely unnecessary budget expense.
All that said, UP is a wonderful animated film and not just for children, another idea that Walt Disney had that has often been forgottenthat animation is not just for children. The feature animation from other nations bears this out.