Up, up and away: Pixar does it again

Another Pixar movie and another grueling stress test on my thesaurus — “beautiful” can only be written so many ways in so many reviews. For Up, I think “resplendent” is a fitting variation.

Once again, Pixar’s animators and storytellers have outdone themselves with this dreamy, wide-eyed wonder of an adventure tale starring, who else, a plucky octogenarian and Boy Scout geekus who’s missing his Assist an Octogenarian Across the Street Merit Badge — “You’re going to feel so assisted,” he tells the man many years his senior. These are hardly the superheroes of other animated movies, which is why they work so wonderfully in this crowd-pleasing triumph of a film that transcends the adventure it so easily dispenses.

The animators dream as children dream: in vibrant colors, peppy cartoonish motions, panoramic vistas and easy-to-understand language, all of it skewed slightly off center, like a picture frame hanging ever so slightly to one direction, with the result being some strangely shaped characters and a tilted sense of humor. And, of course, the dogs talk, but there’s a logical explanation for that.

The old man is Carl Fredrickson (Edward Asner). He probably looks like your grandfather, or a caricature of your grandfather, with these big square mitts, a pinkish nose as a round as a baseball and a chin so horizontal and level he could be a carpenter and he wouldn’t have to carry as many tools. He’s assembled with a broad collection of old-man gags: his front door is dead-bolted with primary and secondary locks with reserves and backups just in case, his teeth are kept in a jar at night, and his cane’s feet are fitted with tennis balls, Wilsons I think. Although we never see how he carries his money around, we can assume that it’s in one of those little rubber pinch purses. He may be old, and a widower, but he’s no crotchety miser; he has a tender, albeit grumpy, countenance and the soul of a kitten.

Carl’s home is being encroached on by big business — Enron, Countrywide, Starbucks, take your pick — so rather than be the victim of an open-and-shut eminent domain case he harnesses thousands of helium balloons to his house and floats right out of town. The Boy Scout (Up’s version is Wilderness Explorer) is found stuck on the porch at a cruising altitude of 5,000 feet. His name is Russell (Jordan Nagai) and “precocious” only begins to crack him. He admires Carl’s flying home: “Wow! Most people take a plane, but you took your whole house so you could bring your TVs and clocks and stuff.”

After they land, Russell goes into Wilderness Explorer mode as he puts together a tent and, like all tents, the poles are in control of the construction at all times. The scene ends with the poles erected up through Russell’s shirt and catapulting the rest of the parts out of sight into a canyon, a conclusion so realistic that camping enthusiasts will nod in agreement. Russell, not an ounce of gloom in his eyes, says dryly, “Tents are hard,” and then bounces back as if nothing happened. He’s a cute kid, for sure, but his rejuvenating optimism fills Up’s bedsheet sails.

Carl and Russell, separated in age by about seven decades, soar off to South America — Russell: “It’s like America, but south” — to find a lost rainforest where Carl can read his AARP magazines in peace. (Although, it's unlikely he'll be able to pick up a signal carrying Lawrence Welk.) The adventure leads them into the clutches of a long-forgotten explorer, a giant bird named Kevin, a zeppelin complete with an on-board dinosaur fossil museum, and a colony of dogs wearing special collars that translate their doggy brain waves into English, Japanese, or Hillbilly … whatever the occasion calls for.

Some of the dog scenes went on a little long for my taste, but that’s as close I’ll let a complaint get to Up, a breathless delight of a picture that endears itself to us with its lovable heroes with real personalities and swashbuckling adventure. Children will adore all the high-speed chases and aerial battles, but the adults will be drawn to the stars, mainly Carl Fredrickson.

The film sets up Carl in a way I wasn’t expecting, through a wordless musical montage that flashes back on his childhood, right after he first encounters Ellie, the girl that will eventually become his wife. They meet as youngsters, sprint through adolescence together, marry and then splash each other’s lives with joy so endurable it never leaves the screen, even when the wife does. In one small little scene, the passage of time is gauged by the tying of Carl’s ties. One day he’s a young man, and a dozen or so ties later the camera pans up and he’s gray and wrinkled. What happens next is a Bambi moment handled in a brave, yet entirely honest, way. If you don’t cry, or if microbes of moisture don’t appear somewhere on your eyeballs, then you’re a Cylon or a terminator or some kind of mechanical can crusher. It’s poetic, heartbreaking and, yes, beautiful.

Up also moves a mile-a-minute, especially with its jokes, which seem to come bounding out of the jungle from all directions. Some of the humor is simple visual gags, like flamingo-looking Kevin mimicking Carl and thumping his head with its beak. And then some of it is deadpan irony at a level that’s almost sinister. For instance, one of the talking dogs, Dug, tells a joke with this punch line: “It is funny ’cause the squirrel is dead.” The setup, which I will let you discover, is brutal and maybe not all that funny, but its inclusion in a film like Up seems noteworthy.

Above all else, Up’s creativity is exquisite. The way the house is brought into and out of the picture must have been a challenge for writers, yet here it all makes complete sense. And the house provides most of Up’s visual language: Carl steering it through the clouds, him and Russell dragging the floating residence through the jungle with a garden hose, camping underneath it during a rainstorm, the look on Carl’s face as balloons periodically pop and the porch hangs even closer to the ground. Homes are just vessels for our lives, and this home is a vessel for the whole film, yet also so much more.

No studio in the history of filmmaking is this consistent. Each new Pixar film is a treasure, and each new character is a gem. Meanwhile, box office analysts say Pixar can’t make money or win hearts with loveable monsters (Monsters Inc.), robots that communicate non-verbally (Wall•E) or geriatric seniors and their nerdy Wilderness Explorer helpers. What do the analysts want, demographic studies showing that children want slang-spewing, spiky-haired ’tweens on skateboards? That’s what’s going to kill the Disney Channel, but not Pixar.

Not Pixar.