This special double feature (Up and Drag Me to Hell) is a bit dated now, written when the website was still under construction.  Hope you enjoy anyway.

–Duncan

PARADOXICAL DOUBLE FEATURE, Pt. 1: Human Cartoons

If pressed to sum up the zeitgeist now for children’s animated films, I would say it’s largely made up of the following: ironic genre spoofs; pop culture references; top-billed celebrity voices (more so than ever); jokes about weight, odor, and bodily gasses; and other staples of the postmodern entertainment age, god bless it.  All of which, of course, can be fun for inner- and outer-children and have powered DreamWorks Animation as a box office contender.

But then you have Pixar, which doesn’t really emphasize any of those things, but has instead branded itself with a consistent track record of more artful and imaginative modern fairytales (Cars, their only average movie, notwithstanding).  At its best, Pixar’s animation tends to focus more on wonder, graceful humor, and a beating digital heart.  And irony?  Pixar movies are often painfully sincere—their cartoon characters seem more human than most actual humans at the multiplex.  And it does it all without losing a whit of accessibility or enjoyment.  More than anyone else, they’ve proved that a cartoon can escape the slight connotations of the term.

Lately, I’ve had to admire some of their more counterintuitive decisions, from an allegorical fable about a culinary rat to a nearly silent robot love story (both of which, apparently, presented a challenge to marketers). And now, with Up, they have perhaps picked their most counterintuitive children’s movie hero yet: a lonely old man.

For the first time, Pixar’s hero is a perfectly ordinary human being: Carl Fredrickson (voiced by Ed Asner), who’s led a simple life selling balloons and living with his wife, Ellie.  After she dies, he decides to finally fulfill their lifelong dream of going off to South America for an adventure.  And so, bereft of money and with the modern world sprouting up around him, he attaches hundreds of balloons to his house and takes off in it like a blimp, not realizing that Russell, a young Wilderness Explorer (read: Boy Scout), is stuck on his porch and along for the ride. The house flies over a monochromatic city—a whimsical escape from modernity if there ever was one—and it’s easy to see why Up fits in as the first animated film to ever open the Cannes Film Festival.  Jacques Tati would be proud.

And yet, as it goes on, Up left me conflicted.  Pixar has always made movies that aim for both children and adults–not to mention adolescents embracing their inner child en masse–but rarely have the kid parts and adult parts felt so clearly delineated.

The first half hour or so of Up is nothing less than one of the most beautiful animated films I have ever seen.  Pixar, tackling their most mature subject matter to date, sketches Carl’s adult life in a touching sequence.  He lives small, stays in love, saves up, and never quite gets ahead.  Ellie can’t have children, and fate conspires to keep their savings small. Slowly, as he and Ellie grow old, there’s a powerful sense of melancholy, of dreams that have slipped out of reach. The animation is graceful, wordless, and musical. By the time Ellie’s health starts to fail, I had a lump in my throat.  Staring at the screen, I had to wonder if it was a put-on: after all, the movie had just premiered at number 1 with $68 million.  Did Pixar really just slip a subdued art film about old age into the top of  box office?

The answer, as it turns out, is both yes and no, as the film reaches a point where it shifts.  Before you know it, Carl has arrived in South America, and the movie abandons much of the themes and concerns of the beginning in favor of a more typical children’s movie.  In short, it goes for adventure, which is not inherently a bad way to go.  It juxtaposes adult concerns and childlike fantasy, and it allows Carl to see what he was missing and realize that, though his adult life didn’t fulfill his childhood dreams, it was hardly a waste.

But as adventure stories go, the one in Up—concerning a rare bird, a mad explorer, and a hundred talking dogs—feels almost out of place, offering moment to moment pleasures but not satisfying momentum.  The conflict and the villain are thinly sketched rather than fleshed out, which is unusual for Pixar, and the action can’t help but feel trivial placed alongside the weight and beauty of the early scenes. The plot and character arc start to feel stalled.  And as the hobbling old man from the beginning races through the jungle in chase sequences that have only one real possible ending, what once felt like flesh and blood starts to feel more like pixels. Perhaps due to the short running time, certain elements, like Russell’s estrangement from his own father, are mentioned but largely sidelined.  Up’s pathos returns near the end, as heartbreaking and sweet as ever, but in between it’s largely content to be, well, a cartoon—not a bad one at all, but unsurprising, and nowhere near the spectacular heights of the beginning.  My thoughts on the film are summed up by a telling line from Russell.  Perhaps delivering a message from the filmmakers to the children in the audience, who may one day see Up in a new light, Russell recounts an old memory and says, “I know it may sound boring, but the boring parts are the parts I remember the most.”

Of course, criticizing a kid’s movie for catering to children is the first step down a long lonely path that ends with me becoming Rex Reed, and I hope to avoid that however possible. To that effect, it’s worth noting that even when it dips into the ordinary, Pixar is far too skilled with animation, little details, and visual gags for it to ever dip too far.  And even in the moments when it more clearly aims for children, it has a cartoon classicism to it, separating itself through whimsy even if it doesn’t carry the weight of Pixar’s best work.  Plus, it’s hard to feel too suspicious of compromises when it contains some of their most daring material.

In the end, there are two ways to look at Up: either it retreats from its weightier themes and doesn’t fully capitalize on its promise, or it takes a children’s adventure and manages to slip in a beautiful meditation on old age.  Either way, Up is another winner.  And it’s a testament to the strength of Pixar’s track record and the promise of the beginning that Up can, on the whole, feel both underachieving and remarkably beautiful.

4 out of 5 stars.