... am I supposed to care?

Rating: 1/10 (11 November 2013)

For the most part, Pixar films seem almost totally immune to criticism. I'm not really sure what it is, but Liam Colle might have given us a hint when he said of the studio's repertoire: "These are not kids movies that parents can sit through. Pixar makes grown-up movies that parents don't feel guilty about letting their kids watch." I think people think they're SUPPOSED to like them because of the "cute" factor, and I also think that the 3-D animation ties into this.
Because, let's face it: Disney animated classics such as "Sleeping Beauty" would not have worked so well or at all with live actors. Neither would Pixar's. But Disney of old (and I insist well on this point!) could get away with the flashy, fantastical, imaginative storyboards precisely because the animation was beautiful and fluid. Pixar's is flat, sterile and robotic. The elements all look plastic. This is just part of the limitation of 3-D rendering. Sure, this worked for Toy Story, because all the characters WERE plastic toys.
But stories about actual characters fall flat, because we simply can't relate to the characters. That leaves the cuteness and threadbare humor (if you are the sort who finds this stuff funny, and I am not) to sustain the film, and I have to opine that it is a really sad state of affairs when the adults of our society consider cuteness sufficient power for sustaining a dramatic narrative.
Now for "Up" itself. The beginning part is dreadfully depressing, and might work for a live-action art house film, but I can't imagine a child (again, this is NOT a kids' film, but it is marketed as such) sitting through it without crying. The second half of the movie leaves us with a grumpy old man and an incredibly annoying kid stuck in a tangle on an extraordinary adventure, trying to extricate themselves from a problem that the kid caused. There is no meaning, no feeling: just cuteness, if you aren't sufficiently annoyed by this point.
"Up" really should have been two movies: one picturesque live-action film about the old man, with no extra-possible situations, and one plasticky CGI film about a random lonely old man and a kid. The latter would have been utterly ignorable but still would have garnered the praise of critics. And such a cleavage would have avoided the film we actually got, which was the latter with connotations of pretension toward the former, adding insult to injury.
Pixar... just go away, please?