Pixar's Up
Posted: 7/2/2009
Written By: Dan
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A very good friend of mine laments the loss of the inspiration and swashbuckling of adventurous movies from our youth. I can’t be sure that we haven’t overly-romanticized those movies (because some of them were quite bad through an adult’s eyes), but to a greater or lesser degree, I often find myself echoing his lament.
Except when it comes to Pixar movies.
In fact, I daresay that Pixar movies consistently outperform those movies I loved as a child. They offer exactly what I hope my children will relish and desire, and they wrap it all up in a glitzy, shiny package. But what they excel at most, from this dad’s perspective, is three-fold.
Pixar movies inspire a sense of wonder. In each of Pixar’s previous movies, we’ve been presented with a new world, often a spin on our own. Whether it’s post-ecological-apocalypse in Wall-E, a secret bogey-filled dimension in Monsters, or the all-too-animated in-animates of Toy Story.
Wonder takes us out of our real life experience and into an experience we can enjoy. Perhaps it is enjoyable because it is not our experience. But what Up excels at is harkening our sense of wonder and connecting it to our lives. Am I, as a Dad, emboldening my children with a sense of wonder, a hope for something great? Or am I resigning them, at their young ages, to a humdrum life of tedium and mediocrity? And for me, the even greater question is: which life does my God have in store for them?
Pixar movies challenge your preconceptions. Up’s greatest plot twist is (and my apologies to those of you who are both reading this and have not seen the movie – though there should be relatively few of you both) the blessing Carl gets from his wife to go out and create his own new adventures.
Life, for many of us, is about meeting someone else’s expectations. Even unspoken promises become nets that entangle us for life, as they did with Mr. Fredericksen. His continuous vows, spoken and otherwise, to visit Paradise Falls with his wife became a snare for him, an anchor the movie deftly portrays in the form of his house.
The house was originally the nexus of adventure for Carl and Ellie, when they first met as youngsters. Throughout their married lives, a short montage shows us, the house continues to be a part of their adventure, actually preventing them from going on what Carl sees as the true adventure, a trip to the deep, deep South.
This house becomes a burdensome weight for Carl, not just in marriage, but again when he sought to finally fulfill his lifelong vows of adventure. It was only near the end when the house again became an active part of the adventure, once again redeemed to its original purposes. Perhaps the greatest misconception Up debunks is two-fold:
• A house can be a major character in a film, sans personification of any kind.
• The purpose is in the journey, not in the destination.
Pixar movies make emotions part of the story. When we watch Carl and Ellie grow up, get married, and experience life’s challenges together, we see love. The lump catches in your throat, a little moisture escapes from your eyes. The characters have become fully-realized, largely by evoking emotion within the viewer.
Now, when you see Carl stand up to the near-faceless developer, we don’t see him as a crotechety old-timer who can’t keep up with the times. Instead, we see a man defending the honor of his wife’s dreams, and we wish to join the fight.
But Up also limits the emotional expression of its characters. Most of our emotions are tied up with Carl. When we feel fear for Russell, it’s because Carl is afraid. When we rejoice over a successful escape, we rejoice just as Carl realizes his good fortune. Up has limited the viewer’s emotional investment to a central character, and thereby harnessed our emotions to serve the advancement of the story.
Now, we can debate several things here. We can debate whether or not movies, as a storytelling medium, should present such a moralized view of their subject. We can debate whether or not they actually succeed in that arena. But what we cannot debate is that Pixar is attempting to meet that challenge.
In my opinion, Pixar is clearly exceeding the efforts of any other animation studio in this regard. In fact, I would say that Pixar does this better than any movie studio – period, especially its parent company, Disney, with its two-dimensional characters, simplistic storylines, and saccharine morality.
Up is a wonderful film with fully realized characters and an emotionally gripping and stirring plot. But perhaps the highest praise I can give is that, like other Pixar films, Up is its own entity. It does not exist to support or touch on any other Pixar creation, and in the process of not being our world, it somehow challenges how we live our lives in this one. That is a success in storytelling I crave to one day experience.
In the meantime, though, I’ll crave an ice cream with Carl and Russell on a curb in front of Fenton’s.
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