A young scout yearns to help an elderly widower in order to earn a merit badge. A senior citizen unfurls hard-learned life lessons for the world. Disney/Pixar’s Up is a lofty film that thrives off old fashioned values, and it is your new number-one 2009 summer blockbuster. Complete with newsreel footage only a great grand-dad could recall, Up is a film which cherishes that very dated, old fashioned concept – great storytelling.
In an age where Dreamworks’ feeds us a steady diet of kung-fu pandas and boogie-in-your-butt lemurs voiced by the guy that gave us Borat, three-to-thirteen year olds have a place to fill up on some traditional values – Disney/Pixar.
My wife and I took our 6-year old boy to see Up on Saturday to a packed movie theater in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood. All we heard in the theater was laughing, deep emotion and applause. And why not? Up is film that, had it been produced with live actors decades ago, may have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It is classic American storytelling – true love, big dreams, self-reliance and fierce determination. It doesn’t need gimmicks, politically correct characters or audience focus-group testing to determine its destination. It relies on Russell, who misses his Dad, and Carl Fredricksen, a lost old curmudgeon grieving over the death of his wife – they get us where we’re going. You know them – they’re the sort of folks we see and meet most everyday.
It’s crystal clear — the golden age of animation has returned to the American cinema since Pixar made Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and Up. Pixar virtually invented CGI animation, but masters such as John Lasseter, Brad Bird and others have remembered that dazzling audiences with the computer doesn’t really matter if you can’t remember to have healthy dose of humanity. Case-in-point: the exchange between 8-year-old Russell to old man Fredricksen – when walking though the jungles of South America, Russell recounts a simple day with his estranged Dad as they counted cars on the curb of a local ice cream shop. “That might sound boring,” Russell says with a flushed face, “but it’s what I remember most.”
“Wonder and interest doesn’t have to come out of pizazz and spectacle and huge ideas. … I always knew that the power came from the small, and not from the big,” Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Newsweek earlier this year. Oh, there may not be any sure-fire Happy Meal spin-offs, or top-40 hip-hop smash hits in Up, but that’s never what has made lasting, and ultimately successful, cinema.
With all this good feeling, there has to be a catch, right? Sure! More and more, Pixar is coming under scrutiny from feminist critics who would rather see female lead characters featured in their films. Seemingly, themes on the the do-not-call-attention-to-list are a father’s undying quest for the well being of a son (Nemo), the willpower and love of an elderly man (Up) or the robot love of Wall-E (apparently, even though the female robot was clearly superior – the film was named after the male robot, and thus, inviting to criticism).
But, hey – it’s summer. Can’t we all just get along? If you want to remember how glorious it is to find true love, to dream the dreams of a child and then find out how life ends up after all that falls apart, Up is your movie…