Pixar at its Playful, Creative, Heartfelt Best

Rating: 9/10 (19 March 2020)

This is what the CG studio does best; dreaming up a playful, preposterous premise (whoah, way too many p's in a row there) and then riffing on it in all sorts of clever, emotionally resonant, visually incredible ways. In this case, of course, it's a cute little airborne house, suspended from a mass of festively-colored helium balloons on a sort of farewell voyage to South America.
The filmmakers don't dwell on the science of this and neither do we. It's just too much fun to second-guess, a slice of childhood imagination come to life, which fits Up's warm narrative like a cozy winter glove. That sense of freshly-rediscovered adventure, a renewed link to the open-minded optimism of our earliest memories, that's what drives the plot and binds us to the cast. Right from the picture-perfect opening scene, arguably the best dialog-free montage ever, it's got us locked in for the long haul. Even when the second act sprawls, threatening to devolve into a broad adventure tale, trailing a long tail of recurring gags, we're thrown a thematic bone to keep it all together, neat and tidy.
The traditional climax may feel just a hair on the flat side - the villain dispensed in a manner befitting a James Bond evildoer - but the story's real apex arrives just before the closing credits, when the preceding ninety minutes of small details and callbacks finally pay off in a rich, appropriate farewell.