Another masterpiece from Pixar

Rating: 9/10 (21 August 2009)

Looking back, I can't help but to immediately notice a very interesting pattern in my past movie reviews. This is the third Pixar movie I have written a review for, and this will also be the third consecutive time that I will open the review with the following sentence: Pixar have done it again. Once again, they have proved that no animation studio – and no live action studio either, for that matter – can come anywhere near the sheer and utter quality of their entertainment, purely and simply put. Pixar have proved once again that they can take a concept and premise that doesn't sound particularly attractive at first, and turn it into a masterwork of cinema. They have proved that unlike their animation studio contemporaries, Pixar don't need celebrity voices and characters specifically designed to be packaged and ready for delivery to toy store shelves, and they certainly don't feel the need to patronize their young audience members by injecting into their films jokes that only parents can understand. And they have proved once again that unlike most live-action studio output, it is still possible to create compelling, dramatic and irresistibly entertaining cinema from original screenplays without falling into formulas, clichés or any other kind of compromise for the sake of the audience. In short, Pixar have once again proved that they are the best film studio working today, period.
So what makes a Pixar movie tick? What makes this studio's output so consistently better than that of pretty much all the other film studios today, animated or otherwise? I think the answer can be summed up in one simple but crucial word: characters. For Pixar, as for all the great screenwriters both past and present, a film begins and ends with its characters; create compelling and identifiable characters and you can pretty safely bet that an equally compelling story will come along with them. Within the first ten minutes of this film, you know you're in for something different as you see Doctor portray in a completely dialogue-less montage an entire life-long relationship, from the shy childhood beginnings of our protagonist Carl and his soon-to-be-wife Ellie and through their ups and downs, hardships living a complete life together, and finally her eventual death, all the while their childhood dream hovering above them but never quite coming to fruition. It is a heartbreakingly beautiful and poignant sequence, probably the best ten-minute block Pixar have ever created, and while the film does take a slightly different direction from there, it doesn't cease from still bringing up very poignant topics throughout, including hardships of old age, unhealthy obsession, divorce, a child's rejection by his father, and other such resonant, real-life experiences that one wouldn't expect to see in a children's film. Here within lies Pixar's secret, which is additionally exemplified in the story and the humor in their films as well: they don't patronize their young audience members by providing two planes of existence in the film – jokes and plot points for the kids and another set for the adults – but rather, Pixar manage to find the subjects, plot points, visual gags and jokes that both children AND their parents can relate to. For example, I'm nowhere near being a parent yet, but I can imagine this film serving as a very good starting-off point for important parent-child discussions, such as divorce, deteriorating old age of grandparents, and where babies come from.
The bottom line is that there is simply no studio quite like Pixar. Only they could represent more genuine human emotion and feelings in a silent, 6-minute short film than any major Hollywood production of the past 10 years (the short preceding the film, "Partly Cloudy", is one of Pixar's all-time best in my opinion, in terms of hilarity but also in terms of poignant emotional resonance). Only they could take a premise of a man tying helium balloons to his house and flying it to South America and turn it into one of the most dramatic, compelling and irresistibly entertaining films of the past few years. Only they could take a film whose protagonists are a grumpy, sour 80-year-old widower and a chubby, 8-year-old obnoxious Asian child and turn it into one of the most massive box office successes of the year. And for that, they deserve all the praise in the world, and them some.