Up, Up and Away: Another New High for Pixar

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In contrast to the muted palette of Carl's home, the South American landscape is a genial riot of color that looks ravishing in whatever format the movie is shown in. Up will be projected in 3-D in many theaters, but there are no special boinggg effects, and you needn't pay the extra $3 to get the emotional or visual lift the picture delivers. In his Variety review, Todd McCarthy wrote that "the film's overall loveliness presents a conceivable argument in favor of seeing it in 2-D: Even with the strongest possible projector bulbs, the 3-D glasses reduce the image's brightness by 20%."

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Echoes of Oz
The movie stirs lots of cinematic echoes, some natural — Walt Disney's Dumbo was a touchstone for Docter — and some weird. The dragging of a large structure over rugged South American terrain is also a motif in the Werner Herzog epic Fitzcarraldo. A love story continued after death: Remember Ghost? Docter also cites Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent, "the story of a solitary guy who reconnects with the world."

The central connection, though, is with The Wizard of Oz, about a lonely girl and her flying house. The old guy alights in a wonderland, meets magical or malevolent animals and an old villain and is rejuvenated by the simple act of letting go of his obsession and caring for someone else. By the end of his adventure, he's a movie superhero, an older version of Indiana Jones. He also realizes that the small pleasures often trump the big thrills. Oz may provide death-defying fun, but what's the matter with Kansas?

Except for The Incredibles, Brad Bird's obligatorily cartoony vision of a superhero family, Up is the first Pixar feature in which the main characters are humans. Up isn't realistic either. It revels in a minimum of dialogue, deft comic underplaying and a style the Pixar people call simplexity, a character design that stresses circles and cubes. (Carl looks like a trash-compacted Spencer Tracy in his later years.) "We tried to push caricature," Docter says, "and the language of shapes — to make these drawings an expression of the characters. Carl wants to stay enclosed in his box of a house. He's just kind of square. His wife is more curves, almost balloon shapes, and Russell is very balloon-like." From his shape, Russell could be the child Carl and Ellie desperately wanted. Kind of takes after his mother.

Every Pixar production involves some 300 artists, but the actors come first; they have to, because the dialogue is recorded to guide the animators. Asner, 79, who used his slow burn brilliantly on the great Mary Tyler Moore '70s sitcom, had the gruffness and deadpan comic timing to bring Carl to vocal life. As Docter recalls, "When we first met Ed and showed him a small sculpture we'd made of Carl, he said [growling], 'I don't look anything like that.' And we thought, O.K., this is gonna be perfect." Docter and Peterson then tailored the dialogue to the actor's speech patterns. "We looked for words that had more consonants and shortened the sentences," Docter says. That cemented the notion that Carl, post-Ellie, is a disgruntled bear that's been poked awake during hibernation.

Nagai, the nonprofessional kid chosen for Russell, needed a bit of coaching. Since Docter had chosen as his co-star in Monsters, Inc. Mary Gibbs, who was all of 2½ at the time, he's a past master at working with kids. "When Jordan had to be excited," Docter says, "he would get maybe 50%. So I'd tell him, 'Run around the room, run back here and say the line — ready, set, go!' We'd do it one line at a time like that." For a scene in which Russell is cradled and tickled by a giant South American bird, "I actually lifted him upside down and tickled him," Docter says, "which you probably wouldn't do with Ed."

He probably won't have to do it with the movie's viewers either; they'll be tickled and touched without prodding. Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, Up is the studio's most deeply emotional and affecting work. Docter says he had a ball digging fresh ground, finding "this nice new road that we got to go out and drive on." The story of a septuagenarian grouch who uses his cane, hearing aid and dentures to thwart all evildoers; a buddy movie whose pals are separated by 70 years; a love story that transcends the grave — has there been a movie like this in the history of feature animation? "Well," says the man who made Up, "I hope not!"

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