UP in 3D is a beautiful and heartbreaking story of an elderly man and a young boy going on an adventure together to South America via the elderly man’s house tied with hundreds of balloons, which is certainly on original story if nothing else. In the movie the place they go to is represented as a lost land filled with wonders like a giant chicken…thing and a talking dog which in some ways is more like traditional Disney than Pixar but what isn’t tradition for them is the adult themes of the script which is always what marks out the major difference between Pixar and all the other animation studios; the scripts are of the highest quality that anyone produce, whether it be for an animated film or live action. At the beginning it shows the elderly man, who I forget the name of, from a young age when he meets the love of his life, marrying her, finding out she’s incapable of having children via a teary doctor’s office moment (when is that ever in any Disney cartoons?) and then with her death. It lasts a few minutes and is incredibly sad. Pixar have that quality; they can make you smile and make you cry and, yes, I did shed a tear when she died; when you can make an audience member cry at the death of character who has only been on screen for a bare few minutes and spoken barely any dialogue then you are a truly powerful writer, reminding me of those first twenty minutes of Wall-E in which there is no dialogue but is absolutely mesmeric none the less.
The script is topnotch as every Pixar movie is which just makes me wonder why so many other animation studios, including the great and powerful Disney themselves (and, yes, I know Disney own pixar but it always feels like they are a totally separate entity) can spend hundreds of millions producing a film in which every box is ticked but the script is always so weak. The big companies believe there has to be certain aspects of the movie that have to be produced for every demographic: there has to be the comedy characters, there has to be the villains and it always, always has to have a happy ending. The only ones that are willing to take a chance are Pixar and surely to god that has to show the big studios that you can take a chance and you shall reap the benefits as Pixar have never made a bad movie and always make an absolutely ridiculous amount of money from each and every movie that they make.
Saying all that I don’t think UP is as good as Wall-E and many other Pixar films. It is very good, don’t get me wrong, but just doesn’t quite reach the greatness of said other films. The adventure is quite simple in which not a huge amount happens, being more the story between the young boy and man and undiscovered youth on his part and an undiscovered future on the boy’s. And some of the elements, in particular the big fight scene near the end feels tacked on rather than organic which is just shame that Pixar had to go down the traditional route rather than deviate from it. And some of the other elements of the movie like the dogs that can talk via electronic collars and even cook food just seem out of place in a reality that we are meant to believe is our own even if it does already feature a giant chicken thing. Being grounded that little bit more in reality would have served it well.
It’s worth seeing and even though I seen it in 3D I don’t think that really added anything to the experience although it did occasionally produce some cool visuals.
