Flight of fancy

The first thing to say about Pixar’s Up is that it’s a bit of a downer—or at least starts that way.

After a lively prologue depicting the childhood friendship (and eventual marriage) of balloon-blower Carl and his free-spirited companion Ellie, the movie comes to a startling halt with Ellie’s death, which leaves the childless, septuagenarian Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) utterly alone. Carl decides to travel to a remote paradise in South America that he and Ellie always wanted to visit. How would he do that? Easy: He attaches balloons to his house and floats away. On one hand, the story suggests The Wizard of Oz crossed with Indiana Jones. On the other, it’s hard to think of another so-called family film that deals so forthrightly with loss and regret.

“This one was kind of based on the idea, or the fact, that I’m not really an extrovert,” director Pete Docter says. “By the end of the day directing people at Pixar, I just want to crawl under my desk and kind of hide.”

In April, The New York Times published an article speculating whether Pixar could pull off its usual box-office bonanza with such an unconventional film. Apparently, investors in Disney were worried that a movie featuring a giant bird named Kevin and a pack of talking dogs would somehow have zero commercial appeal. “In some ways that was sort of taken out of context,” Docter says. “We make [a movie] for ourselves—we’re like the test audience.”More to the point, rave reviews from the Cannes Film Festival—where Up played as the opening-night selection on May 14—suggest the movie isn’t so inaccessible after all. Up was unprecedented for opening the festival in 3-D, which sparked a lively debate in the press corps about the merits of the technology.

“It sort of seems to be a personal thing,” Docter says. “Some people feel that, I think, the reason you go to movies is to be drawn into this world—to feel like you’re lost in this other experience that you never get to experience in real life. For some people, 3-D really adds to that.”

But like Jeffrey Katzenberg, who’s been touring the country promoting 3-D as the future of cinema, Docter doesn’t believe in projectile effects; rather, he wanted the 3-D to simply add a subtle level of dimensionality to the image. “It was definitely something I wanted to use as a device to tell the story,” Docter says. “We’re not selling 3-D. For me, when I sit in the audience and people are going ‘boogabooga,’ then I’m conscious that, hey, look, I’m watching 3-D as opposed to losing myself in this world.”

In the eight-year gap between the release of Monsters, Inc., his last feature as a director, and now, Docter worked on assembling the English-language version of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle—an experience he says influenced the way he approached Up. “The thing I learned is that [Miyazaki] grabs your attention with truth—just these well-observed little moments of either acting or this specific thing that a kid does or even how he [captures] nature, a drop in a puddle or a frog or things like that,” he explains. “We tried as much as we could to get that sort of thing into our film as well, but it’s more of an approach than a style that we’re mimicking.”

He adds, “Animation isn’t a genre—it’s a medium. You can [make] a horror film or a murder mystery or anything like that. WALL•E was a foray into science fiction, which we hadn’t really done. Hopefully this is something unique as well, just in a different direction.”

Up opens Friday.

Read the full review of Up

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