up movie review new york times

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Search Help Home > Movies > Up

READER REVIEWS

Action/Adventure, Animation, Comedy

Jonas Rivera

Distributor

Walt Disney Pictures

Release Date

May 29, 2009

Release Notes

Official website.

Directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson are savvy tricksters. The first half of Up is all demented free association, with a dream logic both baffling and hilarious. The second half is outlandish but formulaic: Jules Verne melodrama with a Captain Nemolike obsessive (Christopher Plummer at his most plangently sinister), plus talking dogs, plus a needy, fatherless adolescent. In search of a merit badge for assisting the elderly, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), a roly-poly Asian-American wilderness explorer, gets caught on the porch when the house lifts off, then irritates the old man with his chatter. We know that Fredricksen will become a surrogate dad, but Asner has perfected this growly persona: He will turn out to have a tender heart, but it will never be on his sleeve.

The look of Up is a world away from Pixar’s usual CGI intricaciessimple in a way that only artists with a genius for complexity can achieve. The characters are like wittier Cabbage Patch dolls. Has there ever been a human hero as off-putting yet accessible as Fredricksen, with his big square head and big square glasses and big round nose? The geometry is so basic, the impact so startling. Russell, his tiny eyes nestled in a blob of a face, must be the least immediately lovable of animated tykes. But he won me over. As in other Pixar films, the relative immobility of the features dries out the sentimentality and draws us in. The movement from inexpressiveness to vulnerability is inexorable.

By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloonsbunched into the shape of one giant balloonare as pluckable as grapes. The dogfight with canine pilots would have brought a salute from the late Charles M. Schulz. A mammoth, multicolored bird with an uncanny resemblance to the monster of the fifties sci-fi picture The Giant Claw sticks its beak into people’s faces and emits a flabbergasting croak: You can almost feel the air. Complaints? Once Fredricksen’s wife, Ellie, passes away, there are no women charactersbut Pixar has always been a boys’ universe. (More’s the pity: Girls like toys, too, and Coraline demonstrated the fertility of female escape fantasies.) Otherwise, the movie is practically a metaphor for Pixar’s storytelling: down, down, down; up, up, Up. — David Edelstein