… and Away!

National Review, June 22, 2009 by Ross Douthat

THE highest-grossing May movies included a prequel to the X-Men trilogy, a reinvention of the sprawling Star Trek franchise, the sequel to 2006's Night at the Museum, the fourth Terminator movie, and a sequel to The Da Vinci Code. The highest-grossing films of the next month or so will almost certainly include the sequel to 2007's Transformers, the third movie in the Ice Age franchise, and Land of the Lost and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, remakes of a Seventies television show and a Seventies caper movie, respectively.

Perhaps you're detecting a pattern here. But then, thank God, there's Up, sitting between all these sequels and prequels and remakes like a battered Victorian house amid pricey modern high-rises--a Victorian house, that is, with a raft of helium balloons attached to the roof, tugging it upward toward the clouds. Up has no recognizable characters, no bankable stars, and no franchise potential. Its hero is a codger of 78; its decidedly unconventional plot mixes together elements from Arthur Conan Doyle, Chris Van Allsburg, and The Notebook. Yet the only question isn't whether its box-office numbers will climb, but how high.

That's because Up is a Pixar movie, and Pixar movies always prosper, defying all the laws of Hollywood gravity along the way. The Pixar people don't do adaptations and remakes. They don't hire bigname directors, and their voices are usually provided by working thespians--your Holly Hunters and John Goodmans--rather than high-profile stars. (Up's biggest name is Ed Asner, voicing the senior-citizen protagonist.) Their stories are original and inventive, but also strange and sometimes hard to summarize. And they never fail to hit it big.

Individual directors sometimes have runs like this, but entire production companies rarely do. The pressures of philistinism and commercialism are too potent: Eventually, you end up making The Incredibles Forever or WALL-E Salvation, and churning out endless Happy Meal toys and direct-to-video knockoffs.

But not the gang at Pixar. The fact that they're doing animation helps, of course--among other things, they don't have to worry about A-list stars' demanding rewrites--but the more important factor may be the time they take on every movie. The idea that flowered into Up, for instance, first came to its eventual director, Pete Docter, during the making of Monsters, Inc., all the way back in the year 2000. As he tells it, he doodled a floating house, borne aloft by helium balloons, and "it seemed very appealing and poetic and interesting. We started thinking, 'Who's in this house? Where is he going and where is he coming from?'"

Nine years later, we finally have the answer. The house belongs to Carl Fredricksen, creaky, cube-faced, and old--a grouch with a cane, hanging on to the house he shared with his late wife while a creative-class metropolis, all lofts and sushi bars, rises around him. His past is filled in via montage: a childhood spent playing explorer and watching newsreels about the famous explorer Charles Muntz; a marriage to a woman who shared his dreams of travel and adventure; and a lifetime of dashed hopes--infertility, penury, aging, and death, with the great voyages they'd planned to make together left untaken. It's the most quietly devastating ten minutes of animation since Bambi's mother took a hunter's bullet.

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The movie isn't called Down, though, and the melancholic opening quickly gives way to a madcap, surrealist adventure, featuring lost continents, mythical birds, and dogs equipped with collars that translate their thoughts into English. (Professions of loyalty figure prominently; so do shouts of "Squirrel!") Condemned to a nursing home following an altercation with a construction worker, Fredricksen achieves lift-off instead, putting his career as a balloon salesman to good use and setting sail for the South American waterfall his wife always dreamed of seeing. Inevitably, he brings along a stowaway--a cherubic, chattering Scout named Russell, whose own child-of-divorce sorrows are swaddled in merit-badge-collecting good cheer.

But the melancholic note endures, vibrating just below the surface of the story. Like many Pixar efforts, Up is shot through with nostalgia. The Incredibles was an homage to the gee-whiz spirit of Fifties America; Ratatouille an idealized evocation of Belle Epoque Paris; WALL-E a Wendell Berry-esque fable about the corruptions of technology and the virtues of the soil. Here, the past being evoked is Hollywood's own age of adventure--the era of King Kong and King Solomon's Mines, when swashbuckling heroes and mythic locales played every day at the local movie theater.

Fredricksen's journey brings him face to face with his boyhood idol, the now-ancient Muntz, who's trapped himself in an Ahab-esque quest to capture an enormous, flightless bird. Together, they enact an afternoon-serial-style struggle, complete with dirigibles and dogfighting propeller planes. The joke, of course, is that they're both in their dotage--a septuagenarian and a nonagenarian, whaling away at each other with walking sticks, and freezing in mid-swing when their legs creak and their backs stiffen up.