Up (2009) - Pete Docter & Bob Peterson

Up (2009)
Directors: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson (co-director)
Writers: Bob Peterson (Screenplay and Story), Pete Docter (Screenplay and Story), Thomas McCarthy (Story)
Starring: Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, Delroy Lindo

The people at Pixar seem to be among the few people out there that understand the concept of visual story telling. Film is obviously a visual medium but starting about the time that sound was added film makers have slowly forgotten this. More often than not they would rather tell us something with dialog instead of just showing it to us. Because of this, I am always amazed when a film comes a long that really takes advantage of film as a visual story telling medium. It is even more amazing when it comes from a film that is supposed to be a kid's movie.

Pixar really seems to have a handle on this though; there last two films have involved a great deal of story telling with very little dialog. In WALL-E (2008) almost the entire first half of the movie is told with a minimum of spoken lines. In Pixar's most recent film, Up (2009), they manage to tell an almost entire love story from beginning to end in the same fashion. There were no words to get in the way but we knew exactly what was going on. Not only that, they were able to draw me into the characters in a way that most movies could never do.

That is another one of the things that made this movie so wonderful. I really felt for the characters throughout the entire film. I genuinely cared about what happened to them. I was sad when they were sad, I was happy when they were happy and I was excited when they were excited. I made a real emotional connection with them and that really helped to draw me into this movie. It wasn't that overly sappy and sickeningly sweet kind of emotion either. It was real emotion that you feel for realistically created characters.

Ed Asner does a great job voicing Carl, a crotchety old widower who decides to finally go on the adventure that he always promised his wife they would take. His voice along with the great animation from Pixar managed to create a very believable character that you can't help but fall for. The rest of the characters in the movie are created just as well. You can really tell that Pixar cares about creating interesting characters and isn't interested in just using stock characters that we've seen a hundred times before.

The story for Up was also quite well done. Obviously there is the adventure part of the story that is aimed at kids but that part of the story is also accessible to the adults in the audience. There are a lot of fantasy elements in the adventure part of the story but they are integrated so well into the story that they work perfectly. There are some much more adult parts to the story though. This is a movie that deals with love and loss and death and deals with them in a pretty up front manor. Nothing is glossed over when dealing with these emotional concepts in the film. However, these are also dealt with in such a way that young kids that don't understand these concepts are not going to be confused by the film.


Honestly, this is just one of those films that works for any age group. It is just an all around fun story with great characters and a lot of heart. It is probably the most fun I have had in a theater in a quite some time. I also thought the 3-D looked great. They didn't go out of there way to do a lot of gimmicky 3-D stuff that is scene in other films. There isn't a lot of stuff thrown at the screen just for the sake of the 3-D. The 3-D did add a nice depth to pictures on the screen though. The film didn't at all feel like I was just watching a flat picture projected on to a wall.

Rating: 10/10