Up crams a lifetime of joy and grief into 5 wordless minutes
Image: Screenshot: Up Film Features The Pixar Moment
When a critic refers to a film as “emotionally manipulative,” it’s usually meant as a bad thing. But perhaps the sin isn’t in milking the audience’s tear ducts and twisting their mouths into quivering, overcooked rigatoni noodles but in doing it poorly. After all, if you’re going to cry in public, a movie theater is a great place to do it: It’s dark, so you can make all the ugly faces you want in the enveloping, anonymous shadows. Ideally, it’s crowded, so no one can be sure just who is blubbering like a toddler whose ice cream fell onto the sidewalk. And there are usually bathrooms within ducking distance, so you can collect yourself and walk away from your nice, cleansing moment of catharsis refreshed and ready to go on with your day.
But even the most experienced movie-theater criers were not prepared for Up. By 2009, Pixar had established a reputation for combining heartwarming cuteness and devastating sadness. Six years earlier, it announced that even death was on the table by killing off almost an entire family of clownfish in the opening scene of Finding Nemo. But that was a movie about fish. Up is about humans and the human experience, which it condenses into a wordless five-minute sequence that The A.V. Club’s Tasha Robinson said “finally top[s] the death of Bambi’s mother on the pathos-and-childhood-trauma scale.”
Usually, a film has to build up to an emotional wallop like this one, offering it as the culmination of 90-plus minutes of getting to know and care about its characters. But Up springs devastation on the audience right away—and is rather sneaky about it besides. We open with a black-and-white parody of a 1930s newsreel called Spotlight On Adventure, where a narrator praises, in a mid-Atlantic honk, the derring-do of dashing explorer Charles F. Muntz. We pull back to a packed movie theater where no one is crying (yet), but Carl, an appealingly spherical boy in goggles, is bouncing with innocent excitement.
Within the span of a couple impeccably timed, pratfall-filled minutes, Carl has made a friend in the wild-haired, gap-toothed Ellie. Ellie’s words whistle through her teeth as she shares her dream of one day living atop the same Venezuelan waterfall Carl saw in Muntz’s newsreel, and it seems we’re up for a movie where these two moppets take off on an exciting adventure deep into the Amazon rainforest. There, they’ll probably meet some talking animals, sing a couple of songs, get swept up in rushing river rapids that take them over the aforementioned waterfall. Eventually, they’ll learn a lesson about how real heroes have heart or something. But not yet.
Instead, director Pete Docter defies our expectations by going from childhood to adulthood with the pop of a flashbulb. Ellie and Carl are getting married, and we learn everything there is to know about their dynamic from the families seated in the pews: large and exuberant on her side, small and somber on his. With similar economy, Docter takes us through their lives together, using visual symbolism to express both their triumphs—we learn Ellie’s pregnant when clouds in the shape of babies float over an afternoon picnic—and their heartbreaks. Parental death is common in animated films, but Up’s depiction of miscarriage and infertility is unusual, and not just because it is able to convey these themes without a single line of dialogue.
The decades pass in shots of coins being tossed into a jar, accidents that eat up all those coins, and a montage of Ellie briskly pulling a series of ties tight around Carl’s neck. Docter pulls back from that montage, and Ellie and Carl have grown old together, balloon boy and adventure girl still dreaming of Paradise Falls. Three efficient shots later—one of him having an idea, one at a travel agency, and one of him tucking plane tickets into a picnic basket—Carl’s ready to surprise his wife with what’s supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. But it’s not to be. Three more shots is all it takes for Ellie to get sick and die, and for Carl to give up on life. His beloved balloons are the poignant through-line.
Up does eventually get around to the adventure and the talking animals—silly, distractible pups whose ability to talk comes from the high-tech collars around their necks. (They don’t sing, which is probably for the best.) It’s cute and it’s funny and it’s well-animated, but without the novelistic level of biographical detail crammed into those first 12 minutes, we wouldn’t be as invested when the film comes back around for one more heartwarming moment at the end. But Docter doesn’t just want to make us cry; he wants us to feel all of life’s emotions, from childlike wonder to crushing grief, all at once. And if that means he’s got to play us like a conductor standing in front of a sniffling, puffy-eyed orchestra, so be it.
233 Comments
While I do argue that Wall-E and few other films represent Pixar at their absolute best in crafting full-fledge story in feature-theater format, first 5 minutes of UP represents Pixar at their incredible peak of short-form storytelling. No other sequences in Pixar’s library even come close to telling the tale of whole lives and dreams and happiness and despair of what it means to grow up, to be, to end, to grieve, and to live.Don’t get me wrong, UP is a fine, fine film. Everything that happens after 5 minutes is pretty much an adventurously goofy and fun epilogue that nicely ties up the themes and stories that the first 5 minutes established.
I’m a film buff who will vouch for “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and most Terrence Malick movies any day, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t possibly my desert island movie. The beautiful montages that bookend the story and the hilarious movie that falls in between. It struck a chord in me.Pete Docter has earned a lifetime pass in my book, though I still hope Soul is great.
Your comment now has me thinking of Charles Munz, wearing torn aviator clothing, riding a sinking monkey-infested raft down the Amazon, deliriously shouting that he will one day return with the bird and show them he was right all along! Fredrickson!!! Fredrickson!!!!!
It’s a solid contender for a desert island movie! For me another one is The Straight Story, and the two movies have a lot in common.
I haven’t seen Straight Story in forever, which I really need to rectify, but I don’t remember it having Up’s, uh, uplift, or more to the point moving in that direction at all.
Well, in any story about an old man, you have the fact that he’s not going to be around for long, so there’s that inhibition to uplift. The Straight Story has Lynchian weirdness and a G rating, which is an amazing combination, but imho it really works because of Richard Farnsworth, who was just all sad-eyed charisma. His performance gave you a whole life story without needing it spelled out. And the movie ends with him achieving his goal, so it worked for me uplift-wise.
THE STRAIGHT SPOILERSFarnsworth (who is indeed great) achieves his goal, which is to see his brother again before they both die. The two movies go in different directions — Up is about realizing that the prospect and reality of death should not stop you from living life, and shows a life being well-lived at the end with the promise of more to come. Straight Story is about the weirdness of life and reality of death, there is not much more that will happen its protagonist. Asner et al will have many more moments, Farnsworth and Stanton just get the one. I don’t think it’s depressing, but it’s not uplifting either.
Pixar has made plenty of good movies since Up, but I still think Up is their magnum opus that they’ve yet to surpass.
Agreed. I would have to sit and think about my Pixar Mt. Rushmore, but I at least know which movie goes into the Washington spot.
If we’re being technical about this, wouldn’t Toy Story fall into the Washington spot?
I feel like a Washington spot goes to the “best” just in terms of prominence, but I wouldn’t argue against “first”.
Dude, this is a reply! Worst failed firsties I’ve seen in some time.
It’s difficult not to go by face shape, in which case Woody is Lincoln and Carl fits best as Teddy.
My Pixar Mt. Rushmore goes, from left to right: Remy, Joy, Miguel, and Wall-E.
Before anyone asks, Woody and Buzz aren’t there because they were in one movie too many and it bumped them off the Elite Tier.
If we are acknowledging that the first 10 minutes of Up carries the rest of the movie to greatness (and, in a related example, the last few minutes of the Six Feet Under final are what makes it a classic), I’d like to posit that only the first half of Wall-E is what makes Wall-E such a beloved movie.
I loveeee this part of the movie and revisit it often, but I didn’t love the rest of Up as much. For me it’s Toy Story 3.
I’m with you – I found the main movie to be too much of a downer. The fact that their idol turned out to be a villainous madman was too dark for my tastes, especially in a kids’ movie.
It’s not a kid’s movie. It’s a family movie in the truest sense of the word – appropriate for kids, enjoyable and resonant for adults. As are most (though not all) Pixar movies.
I agree with you on Up. Great start that loses you as it goes on.I disagree on their peak, that is Ratatouille and Wall-E for me.
Wall-E has the same issue as Up. I can’t even remember it’s third act, but the start is so strong it makes up for the rest.
Somewhat agree. The last 10-15 minutes or so definitely fall flat after such a precise opening and middle.
People always say that, but to me the most emotional moment is when Carl goes back through the scrapbook and finally sees all the things his wife added. To me Pixar hasn’t stopped that
High praise for a movie with exactly 5 good minutes in it.
Honestly, I don’t love Up as much as some of their other movies as a whole, but those first ten minutes are about as perfect as any piece of cinema that’s ever been made, anywhere, ever.
Agreed. Maybe it’s because that first ten minutes sets the bar so completely high that anything after was not going to be as good. My personal favorite and most perfect cinematic scenes are always going to be opening and ending scenes of Arrival; I think about and revisit them very often.
I agree in that the movie suffers after the first ten minutes and I think it’s a bit of a consensus. I wonder if the rest of the movie suffers because the first ten minutes can’t reach the heights of the opening or it’s because the opening is so good, people just forget about the rest of the movie. Honestly, this is one of the few Pixar movies I haven’t felt like I needed to rewatch
Let’s face it, you’d have people dying of heartbreak in the theater if Pixar somehow maintained the emotional intensity of that opening for the entire feature-length film. Kids scarred for life, etc.
I’ve been thinking for the last few days about why I don’t like Up as much as other Pixar movies, and it’s not just that the beginning is so good the rest of the movies pales in comparison. The the action beats and chases and slapstick don’t mesh well with the story. It’s a sad, optimistic movie about an old man realizing he still has some life left ahead of him, but the story is filled with chases and action setpieces and comic relief animals (who are adorable, don’t get me wrong) that drag the whole thing down. I think Inside Out has some of the same issues (too. many. chases), but it helps that the setting and characters are completely fantastical, and the frenetic plot seems to fit the “child’s brain” setting.
I agree the slapstick action in Up does seem out of place alongside that opening. But Frederickson is sort of the straight man for all the craziness going on around him, so his personality fits the need.
It just feels like two different movies to me. The Paradise Falls section isn’t a bad movie at all, but it’s hard to see it as the logical extension of the tender story of Carl and Ellie growing old together.
The best way I can articulate it is that the premise of the movie (a grieving elderly widower facing the loss of independence finds comfort in a friendship with a child) reminds me of Japanese cinema; the visual style (that stiff, unnatural construction site contrasting with all those super-vivid oddly colored trees) reminds me of 60s/70s French cinema; the old-fashioned sense of whimsy (the flying house, the zeppelin, dog with talking collars) reminds me of classic 40s/50s Disney and Warner Bros animation; and the frantic series of chases and showdowns reminds me of a 2000s/2010s blockbuster. It’s a very ambitious movie in terms of juggling tones and styles, but that last style, in particular, just doesn’t gel for me.
If we’re talking about the opening, I agree completely. Those first 10 minutes are the finest storytelling Pixar ever put to animation. But then the rest of the movie happens.
So as a whole, Up is good, but it’s not as well-rounded as some of Pixar’s true best, imo.
I agree. Once the dogs and “bad guy” show up it just goes off the rails. It’s like a totally different movie. It’s kind of similar to Wall-E in that regard, but the stuff on the spaceship has a stronger narrative relevance than what happens in Up. The stuff with the dogs and Muntz are just bizarre and unnecessarily violent.
I’ve long argued this and frankly I don’t think they’ll ever top it. I’ve never agreed with the contention that it becomes a somewhat lesser film after those first five minutes – they’re perfect, of course, but I think everything else is wonderful. It’s an absolute marvel of structure, the talking dog stuff/goony bird stuff is great and I’ve always found the action sequences thrilling. And that “one more heartwarming moment” toward the end is an absolute crusher. God, I’m tearing up just thinking about it.Also, can we talk about how this is probably Michael Giacchino’s best score?
That opening scene of the development of a marriage over time until death is brilliant, no question. I’m less positive about the actual movie about Paradise Falls and fake Charles Lindbergh villain, though.
Up is a really decent short followed by a mediocre, oddly claustrophobic and small-feeling (which is something Pixar is usually very good at avoiding) feature.
UP is a wonderful movie, but I still don’t understand the decision to kill the “bad guy”. Of all Pixar villains, he seems like the single one who would have benefited from a redemption arc.
I don’t understand why they needed to have a bad guy at all. It’s so discordant with the main storyline between Russell and Carl.
I consider this the perfect example of *not* “fridging” a character. Carl’s connection to his late wife and their thwarted dreams is necessary background for the plot of the movie – a lesser film would have *told* us about it, but Pixar instead opted to *show* the hell out of it and communicate a lifetime’s worth of memories in a comparatively brief montage.
FilmCriticHulk had a wonderful essay where he diagnosed the biggest problem with Hollywood screenplays today, as the fact that they assume empathy on the part of the audience. The assumption is that the screenwriters don’t need to give the audience a reason to care about the protagonist, because hey, if they didn’t care, why would they have come to see the movie? And as a result, they just skip that part as unnecessary.One could say that the willingness to persuade the audience that this person’s story matters has been the primary difference between Marvel and DC. Zach Snyder wanted you to marvel at Superman’s abilities, but he was so indifferent to the question of why we should care about Superman that he answered the question of “Will Superman help humanity” in Man of Steel before he asked the question. By contrast, Marvel is marked by its willingness to take their time, and invest the audience, not to mention the other characters, in the hero’s story:And in fact, I’d argue that the biggest reason why DC films after Wonder Woman feel so different, even if they aren’t technically perfect by any means, is that they’ve stopped assuming that people will care about the hero’s story just because it’s the hero and the audience is already in the theater.I mention that, because in that essay, Hulk specifically mentioned the first five minutes of Up both as an example of how to earn audience empathy successfully (which, boy howdy . . .), and why it is so important. It’s not enough to show that Carl is a cranky old guy, even if you gradually fill us in on why he’s cranky. You have to give the audience a reason to invest in Carl’s story. And sure, he could be entertainingly cranky enough to warrant an eventual backstory. But if he’s not, you have to show the audience why they should care about Carl. And I don’t think it’s ever been done better than in those first five minutes.
Brilliant analysis, this nails something I never could quite figure out (and needed to for a personal project, so thank you!!). Really driven home by embedding the Captain America video, too. Of all the Marvel movies, for me that’s the one that truly bears rewatching, for exactly the reasons you articulate.
There’s so many great character moments for Steve in that movie. “I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t like bullies, I don’t care where they’re from.” And of course “I can do this all day.” The grenade jump, the flagpole, etc.
Totally. So many callbacks. I love it.
The grenade scene was the instant that convinced me that Marvel was doing Captain America right.
The extra amazing bit in the scene is that you see Peggy just behind Steve also running towards the grenade but Steve beats her to it. And she stays right there. She is just a few stepd away at the reveal that it’s a dummy. She would have made a great Cap as well.
I have been reading Marvel Comics since the 1970s, but that movie was the first time I ever cared about Captain America. And yeah, it’s because of Steve being willing to take a pounding in an alley and all the rest. I guess the truth is that I’m an MCU Steve Rogers fan, rather than a Captain America fan. (Which Marvel Comics has at times made very easy to not be a fan of. Yikes.)
Yeah, Captain America as Captain America is dull as dishwater. He’s earnest to the point of cheesiness and has such flawless moral clarity it makes him a boring hero. At the same time, the same almost oppressive earnestness and moral clarity is a core component of the character and can’t be jettisoned to update him or make him edgy or conflicted, because now it’s not Captain America.
What makes it work is pre-super soldier Steve Rogers, standing up for the little guy when he was the little guy. He has no physical strength to speak of, but endless mental and emotional toughness to perpetually get the shit kicked out of him without ever giving up or backing down from tough-guy bullies.
The MCU handled the character about as perfectly as possible, with a subtle but defined arc across his three movies and four Avengers movies that never betrayed the core of the character.
One of my favourite moments for Steve is actually one performed by another character: when Doctor Erskine, dying at his moment of triumph, taps Steve on the chest, wordlessly bringing back the line, “Stay what you are: a good man.” There’s just the slightest unspoken tension here. We’ve been shown so far that Steve is a good person, but the challenge to stay true to that is just beginning.
Very good points. Any other film would probably start with the scene of Carl arguing with the construction workers about tearing down his house. You’d probably be able to put together that he’d lost his wife, they had this big dream they never fulfilled, and we’d be off to the races.
But by including the prologue makes you appreciate what Carl lost and what he and Ellie had been pining for their whole lives. You actually feel her presence when he calls the house by her name, and feel satisfaction when you see it perched on the falls at the end of the film. Just that one addition makes a world of difference.
As much as people bitch about “do we need *another* superhero origin story?”, it seems that the alternative is generally worse.
Strictly speaking, both Man of Steel and Captain America: The First Avenger are origin stories, so it’s not that. It’s that origin story or no, you have to give the audience a reason to believe in the what the hero is trying to do. It’s not enough to just say “Hey, they like the IP, or they wouldn’t be here”.To use another example, think about why this scene from Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse feels so epic:It’s not because we like any generic person who puts on the costume of Spiderman. It’s not because I like the Spiderman IP, even though it’s probably the only IP that could rival Superman or Batman for recognizability. It’s because I really felt for Miles Morales, I saw his potential, and I ached with his repeated failures. So when he really becomes Spiderman, it felt amazing.
My thwarted fanboy hope was that they would use Miles Morales in the MCU, and use his backstory to connect the Toby Maguire Spiderman movies into the MCU. Alas.
Not just the presumption of empathy, but also acceptance of the premise without irony. Captain America and Superman are probably two of the most unironic, earnest, super heroes. They can easily fall into camp, and silliness. Just so an old man floating away in his house because of an overabundance of balloons. By the time we get to the ridiculous premise in Up, we already feel grounded, and even (perhaps especially) the grown-ups are invested in the character’s journey.By the time Steve becomes Captain America, he’s shown us that he’s a hero, that he is somehow more honestly patriotic, and idealistic than even the propaganda that’s written for him. We want someone like him to be the hero, we all wish we could be. Honest, courageous, humble, and kind. Superman is no less fantastically moral, and cartoonish in his goodness. Where Man of Steel fails, is it spends so much time questioning whether he should act on that goodness, it fails to tell us clearly, and without irony just how good Clark is. It tries with many of the childhood scenes, but it fills them with too much portent and angst, it makes his being good a moral struggle. For Steve the struggle is never to be good, it’s dealing with the consequences, and it’s feeling like he is somehow not good enough. To be evil, to not do the right thing, does not occur to him. Their goodness is their greatest super power, it is also the thing most easily seen as false, or through the lens of satire. It’s the thing we love about those characters, because it’s the thing we all know is the most fictional thing about them (it is far easier to buy into a very strong person who can fly, than someone who just does what is right without agenda). Man of Steel’s Superman felt like he was wrestling with the enormity of taking on the burden of heroism, Steve felt like he was struggling to do enough, like he felt there were problems he couldn’t solve, and he only wished he could. Clark Kent feels that way, he wants the world to be a better place, he wants people to know the truth and to do the right thing, and he knows there are problems he can’t solve. That’s why he became Superman. They forgot that the core of Superman is Clark (perhaps listening too well to Kill Bill’s ethos that Clark is the mask) and Clark is afraid, he’s humble, he’s good because it’s right to be so, and he’s always kind. The whole reason Superman is so good, is because he was raised as Clark. Kryptonian’s aren’t a bunch of super heroes, that’s just him (and then all the derivations). (Also, the biggest misstep in Man of Steel was in tying his father’s death to his powers, the lesson of Pa Kent’s death is that there are things even being superpowered cannot solve, and that the fragility of human life, is why Clark must do all he can to preserve it. I don’t think it’s an accident that this version’s father dies in a natural disaster, and then this version of Superman goes on to destroy a city. It speaks to a certain way of thinking, one that goes against Clark’s unwillingness to let bad things happen to those who can be saved. That’s not something he needs to learn from seeing his dad get sucked into a tornado.)
Jeez I hate that Kill Bill take so much. Its both exactly backwards, and gets the hero its talking about wrong. Bruce Wayne is a mask for Batman. The death of his parents stripped away all other identity for him. Clark Kent, however, is only Superman because of the values the Kent’s instilled. Tarantino doesn’t get Superman any more than Snyder did.
Of course Battybrain has a good take on Batman lol. I also think Clark is a good representation of what it can be like to be bi-racial, or adopted. He has an identity, he has a culture, but he also knows there’s this whole other cultural identity out there he’s entitled to (maybe even beholden to), but that he’s been robbed of by circumstance. Reckoning with values dissonance, with how he feels as a product of both, the loss he feels for something he isn’t sure he even wants, those are the things I’m interested in exploring with the last son of Krypton. I will say one thing for Tarantino, it was Bill giving the speech, and Bill fails. In the end he is unable to reconcile that Beatrix is in control of her own identity, and that he does not know her as well as he thinks (it is this which gets him killed, not knowing Beatrix knows the technique with which she exacts her vengeance) and it’s possible this monologue is meant to reflect that.
These are all the things we should be seeing in a Superman movie right now. Everyone who says a good movie about him can’t be done because he’s too powerful isn’t trying hard enough.
Damn it, somebody gimme 200M to make a movie already. 🙂
[ satori ]
Well said. The other day I saw on Netflix part of a 2013 Liev Schreiber-Jeanne Tripplehorn romantic “comedy” called A Perfect Man,where they play an American married couple living in Amsterdam. They seem to have a happy life but in the first five minutes, Tripplehorn sees her husband having an affair with another woman, then she tells a friend that it’s the fourth time that she knows of where he’s cheated. This is one of the first things we learn about Schreiber’s character, who’s not given much personality or character traits. I was wondering, “Does the film expect me to care about this guy?” Saw about 40 minutes of the movie. Among other flaws, the dialogue was bad.Bold choice to introduce a character doing what most would label a bad thing (and who would cheat on Jeanne Tripplehorn?), but if you don’t write him at some point with sympathetic qualities but expect us to root for their marriage, then it’s a screenplay failure.
It’s a problem amplified in ‘Justice League’ by the number of characters, but never more obvious than in ‘Man of Steel’: we don’t know these people. It’s almost impossible to imagine what they would be doing if they weren’t superheroes. And as far as Clark goes, we’ve seen from his upbringing that he’s been taught to be anything but heroic. So what do these characters care about? What would they fight for?We know what Carl wanted in life: to be with Ellie, to raise a family, to go on adventures. We know he only gets one of those things before Ellie dies, so we know why he’s a cranky old man now. Whatever happens next in the film (and some of it is pretty wild) we have a sense of why Carl reacts the way he does.
The miscarriage/infertility passage was heart-breaking, and Carl sitting alone in the funeral parlor was devastating, but for my money the single most powerful moment in the movie was when, just before he embarked on the scheme that would power the rest of the movie, he looks at the picture of his late wife and silently crosses his heart. The opening montage both established the meaning of that action and created enormous stakes behind it – from then forward, we NEED to see Carl reach his goal. It was absolutely masterful.
I start tearing up all over again when he finds the rest of the pictures in the scrapbook and the note she left him.
His wife is turned into a fully formed person in just those ten minutes. I feel like we know everything there is about her and their relationship. It’s just so well done in that way. She can’t be seen as somebody who’s been “fridged” because she’s not some random female character used as a plot device but as a whole character too
Kid’s review: “Up’s boring dumb and no singing? I can’t! Put Fwozen on now. NOW!”
Kid’s got potential. Needs to work on his grammar, though.
I hate your child.
I stand by her Cars review: “Poopy!”
So you went ahead with that experiment! Well done. I contributed to your Kickstarter.You changed your comment, and now I look the fool. I begin plotting my revenge now. NOW!
I’m sorry. I tried not to change my comment, but she gave me those puppy dog eyes.
So you did make them removable! Good call. That was my suggestion.
I don’t know. Your comment still works.
It’s more my motto, but thank you.
Up? More like…er….Down! Yeah, take that, movie.
“Listen here you little shit, you will appreciate the bittersweet meditation on regret and the passage of time that is ‘Up’s opening montage, or no dessert for a month!”
The first bit of Up is the Voight-Kampff test.
It even has a turtle.
My whole family doesn’t get to be together a lot, but when we did in 2009, we saw this. There was a row of about ten people sitting in a row of a theater sniffling and snuffing our way through these incredible 12 minutes, and I’ll never forget it. I’m a writer, and a decent one in my mind, but I will never write anything as good as those 12 minutes. Carl Fredricksen would barely work as a character if we hadn’t seen his life’s nadir so early. He’d be just another caricature of a cranky old man.I’ve heard the rest of Up being dismissed as being silly or too cartoonish in comparison to its beginning, but man, I can’t imagine Docter doing it any other way. You NEEDED to see Dug being as goofy as he was (pardon the pun), you needed the truly oddball creature that was Kevin dancing around and making silly noises, you needed the wacky buddy comedy of Carl and Russell, and you needed the trained dogs flying biplanes that had squeaky toys as the controls. If only just for balance.But with that said, let’s all dance like Kevin to DJ Pogo’s audiovisual remix of the film. It’s called ‘Upular’, and it’s a go-to when I need a pick-me-up. Get off of his ROOF!
I don’t if someone remixed it, or Childish Gambino himself didn’t it, but there is a track of him rapping over this. And it is great.
Wow, if you find it, link it here! I’d love to hear it.However, because everything is terrible, I just found out what an asshole Pogo is. Why does everything have to be terrible?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17417748/pogo-youtube-homophobic-nick-bertke
I’d also go so far as to say that opening montage alone got Giacchino his Original Score Oscar.
Outside of that scene and ‘…SQUIRREL!’, rest of the movie’s a blur…
Yeah, Giacchino’s well deserved Oscar for this movie showed him making people cry with his LOST score was no fluke. Also one of the most memorable themes in a millennium where movie scores have moved away from memorable “themes”; I can recognize the theme from Up in the opening four notes of its melody.
The track “Labor of Love” is one of the reasons that the opening scene of the first movie is probably the best from the new Star Trek series.
Oh man. He clearly uses all the tricks he learned from LOST on that single track. The rest of the score sounds a bit different, but that piece could easily have been played in The Constant or some similar episode.
I love the 1930s-style music he uses. A lesser studio would have inserted contemporary pop songs, and even Disney would have probably gone Broadway-style. But Pixar went for a musical template that fewer and fewer people today recognize, and it just fits perfectly.
One of the best moments of my life was riding on the top of the double decker bus that rides up Main Street in Disneyland while eating a strawberry waffle cone and listening to ‘Married Life’ play over the park PA. It has not and will not get any better than that.
I guess I’d never listened to it out of context, but bringing everything full circle to Captain America, I hear a lot of It’s Been a Long, Long Time:
I made a ‘Music of the MCU’ playlist on Spotify, and that song is at the very end of it.
That’s funny because I manage a small cinema and Married Life is banned from the film themes playlists because fuck having to have those emotions running through me when I’m at work.
Following the ‘all is lost’ moment of Muntz capturing Kevin and Russell going to rescue him, Carl tries to move the house, but then, he gets an idea: he tosses out all of the stuff weighing it down and soon, the house is light enough to float. I absolutely love the exuberant, charge-ahead version of the main theme. Makes me cry almost as much as the montage.
As soon as the first music notes of Inside Out (my personal Pixar fave) played, you knew immediately it’s Michael Giacchino (and he continued here with making people cry especially with the Bing Bong scene).
For me, it’s the music that plays when the new core memory is played at the end. We get “Bundle of Joy” in a on xelophone… but then it transitions to major… and the strings come in. and the song, and it transitions from this Brian Eno piece. And then it hits with a tempo change and the full orchestra right before it goes into Bundle of Joy again, this time on piano. Slower than we first hear it, but louder too, more forceful. The music swells, there’s new notes behind it.
It’s probably my favorite moment in film of the last decade. I adore it.
You have great taste! 🙂 That moment you speak of is another example of what I consider a perfect scene and I love how the score changes and swells with the emotions you’re feeling in the scene. “Bundle of Joy” is one of the scores that as soon as those familiar notes play, it makes me feel some kind of way I can’t describe. Hans Zimmer’s main Insterstellar theme does the same thing to me.
It’s not just a blur, it’s bad. It’s a bad movie outside of those five minutes. It’s a Dreamworks talking dog cartoon. But the only thing anyone ever talks about is that first five minutes.
Giving credit where credit is due, though, at least the “talking” dogs have dog motivations and dog tendencies. They’re not four-legged humans.
The callback in the scrapbook is as great as the first 5 minutes, but it’s mostly the payoff for that sequence. It’s also great when Carl gets to be a surrogate father-figure at the Wilderness Scouts event for Russell.
Outside of that…. agreed. There was no reason to write a “dogs in biplanes, kill your former hero and save the day” storyline there. Imagine if Carl had finally met his hero, found out Muntz was a terrible guy who was trying to kill the Kevin bird now…. and after all of the same conflict, Carl managed to remind Muntz of why he became an adventurer in the first place & re-instill the spirit of adventure into both of them. Carl lets the house and all the belongings go, Muntz lets the bird go, and they all go home to Russell’s scout meeting. BETTER MOVIE
Yep. It’s a brilliant short film with a mediocre feature film shoved into the end.
Never agreed with this. I think the rest of the movie is pretty much perfect, as inspired as anything Pixar has made.
I’m glad you liked it, sincerely, but I thought the tone was all over the place and the villain was suuuuper dumb and the whole thing felt aimless and ultimately pointless. Of the Pixars I’ve watched (so no Cars, no Monsters U/Finding Dory, and no Good Dinosaur), the only one that disappointed me more was Brave.What did you like about it? Not gonna do a point-by-point takedown like a dillweed, just legitimately interested in what you got out of it, considering my strong feelings that it’s mediocre.
While the story elements themselves are very much YMMV, (talking dogs, weird birds, chatty Boy Scout) the underlying elements about grief and moving on are sound. The movie isn’t about fulfilling Carl and Ellie’s dream of living at Paradise Falls, it’s about Carl letting go of his life with Ellie and moving on to something new. The counter-point is Muntz, who has allowed a decades-old obsession with this dumb bird to utterly consume his life.
The first ten minutes are so affecting and so effectively put us in Carl’s headspace that it’s easy to miss that the movie is ultimately about letting Ellie go for new people and new relationships.
Again, glad you liked it. Just got way too distracted by the noise to think much of the message, because I felt like the movie didn’t think much of the message either given its wild veers in focus. But as you said, YMMV on the zany elements.
I think the beginning and end are fantastic, the rest is a bit disappointing by pixar standards, still I have to respect the very pixar move of making the opposing leads old ass men. I think more than most studios they have a lot of fun with the idea that a successful family animated movie doesn’t have to be about children/child-coded characters or young adults. Tho Ratatouille might still be the best for that, its a pretty adult film about mostly adult problems, with a surprising amount of drinking for a movie aimed at children.
I don’t think it’s mediocre, but I do think it’s very funny that the third act setpiece of Up involves two old men in a blimp-and-house chase and some – quite literal – aerial dogfighting. It is one of the greatest “Wait, how did we get here from there” plots I can think of in any movie.
That’s the problem I have with it. The “how did we get here” question (for me) is showing how much it doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie.
The final scene where Carl and Russell are outside under the dirigible, the camera pans up and dissolves to his house atop the waterfall, just as he and Ellie imagined. Shit, man.
The other scene from the movie that I remember vividly is the scene at the end where Carl pins the Elle Badge, a bottle cap, on his vest. I didn’t cry at the beginning, but I cried a ton there.
god, Carl’s expressions are so subtle. And very Spencer Tracy.
This ^
This scene hit me even harder than the opening one.
That scene gets too little attention. I lost it for a second time during the movie when this scene was over.
This scene destroys me far more than the opening. He spent so long thinking he let her down, but she was truly happy with him. Guts me. Then the two chairs left behind. I love it. Anyone who says the rest of the movie isn’t as good doesn’t pay attention to scenes like this.
I’ve actually never cried during the montage – despite what others have said, my identification with the character is not yet strong enough to elicit such emotion – but THIS scene is the one that hits hard and gets the tears going.
For me, it wasn’t identification with the characters so much as identification with some of what they were going through.
This scene brings me to tears everytime. And us also my answer to haters who say the movie peaks in the first 5 minutes. This perfectly pays off that first montage and is possibly the most emotional scene pixar has ever made
If any animated movie since Beauty and the Beast made the Best Picture field deserved to win the big one, it’s Up. There were some excellent films in 2009, but none hit me emotionally, wowed my imagination, and warmed me with its humor and heart more than this amazing movie.I’ll also say making a family film with the protagonist being a cranky Joe Paterno looking elder is just as a risky creative venture as a mostly language-free trash robot.
For me, A Serious Man is the only 2009 film that beats Up but I would have been so happy with an Up win for Best Picture.
Up is my second favorite Pixar movie, just behind Toy Story 3. Yes, there are logic flaws, especially with how the Big Bad managed to stay alive for so many years, but they don’t really detract from the story. It helps a lot that Ed Asner is someone I could listen to for hours a day every day. Dude is a pure treasure and has a wonderful voice.
When I watch this scene I always want to redownload The Sims. It’s weird I still remember some the stories I created in that game as a preteen?!?
I remember reading somewhere (Vulture i think) a ranking of all the Pixar movies, and “Up” was in the bottom third. The write-up immediately acknowledges the expected outrage from all of its many fans, but goes on to point out that after the magnificent first five minutes, the rest of the movie is well-executed, funny and occasionally poignant, but not exactly transcendent. When people have warm feelings about “Up” they’re mostly thinking of that opening. Love that talking dog though – “Squirrel!”
I love the talking dogs and I think the first five minutes lends transcendence to the entire movie.
I have to agree with the Vulture take. Remove the opening sequence, and what you’re left with is forgettable at best.
(Russell voice) But it’s a talking dog!!
About those “talking” dogs. Wasn’t it clear to everyone that the dogs’ communication is assisted by their dog collars? Sure, the tech is unlikely. But the collars are just a story-telling device to give each of the dogs a distinct (albeit canine) personality.A small thing, maybe. But if we’re going to critique the fantasy, I think we owe it to ourselves to get the fantastic details right.(Back in its time, I was also bugged by the too-serious critics who failed to understand that the dog in A Boy and His Dog wasn’t “talking”, either. Spoiler alert: it was telepathic.)
I never bothered to parse that particular issue BUT I just listened to an interview on NPR with a journalist who is interested in whales and apparently scientists are trying to decode whale communications and I absolutely want to know more about that.
“He’s lonely.”
I would agree with that assessment. The opening earned Up all its good will. And good will goes a long way. The flim basically got a free pass after that, and it is a little strange people are so hesitant to criticize the rest of it, which I would say, is the actual movie.
I’d argue that Up is one of their most daring films because it manages to not have any real rules about how it’s world works, establishes nothing but Carl’s backstory, and we still buy it because it grounded itself so well at the start.
The montage is achingly real. Then, after grounding you, it increases the strange in bits so gradually while keeping the pathos that you hardly realize it. You’ll buy the flying house because it was established by the airship and the floating balloon cart in the montage. You buy Kevin because birds imprint, and because Doug is done so well, explained, and you’ve already bought into the other stuff you can just go with it. Just as it gets really, really cartoony they ground the story again with Carl finding the book. By the time we get to an 103 year old zeppelin flying adventurer trying to kidnap a bird and kill our hero with a squadron of plane-flying dogs we’ve bought into our lead so much that we are along for the ride.
Wall-E, Inside Out (Pixar’s other two most daring films) all took time to explain the world. Here we just get dropped in, and because it grounded itself so well in the internal life of the main character it all holds together. One might quibble with the two tacked on action scenes, but other than that everything here manages to work, and that’s a damn movie miracle.
People say “Lassiter Lassiter” but Docter scripted or came up with the story for Wall-E, Up, Monster’s Inc, Inside Out and the first two Toy Stories. Pete Docter is a genius.
I’d say the genius was in the way they DID build the world with clear rules, without doing so obviously. How zeppelins and giant birds are established in the news footage, how the insane lifting power of balloons is shown off the first time we see Carl’s cart, even stuff like the “snipe hunt” and Russell’s GPS subconsciously prepare us for the giant bird and the talking collar/GPS. There’s even a lot that the audience anticipates based on the first scene of his living his sad widower life: literally everything he’s NOT doing in that scene, he will have to do in spades later.
Yeah, I just don’t agree with that at all and I wish people didn’t take it as such as given. There’s absolutely wonderful stuff in the whole movie that builds on and pays off the themes set up in those perfect first five minutes.
Completely agreed. When I watched it for the first time, I was prepared for a silly, boring movie that didn’t live up to the first five minutes, and by the end I was baffled that it had garnered such a reputation. It absolutely pays off the ideas from the opening montage and then goes on to seamlessly add additional thematic wrinkles. It’s a real masterpiece.
Naw man that part where Carl finally reads through the rest of the scrapbook is heartwrenching. Brings me to tears everytime.
It had to be transcendent to make the top 2/3?
“I was hiding under the porch because I love you.”
WHY DIDN’T THEY ADOPT???Otherwise, I fucking love this movie.
Not everyone wants to adopt, and it’s not a simple or easy thing for most people. Please don’t ever say this to a real-life couple dealing with infertility.
I knew a real life couple dealing with infertility, and it was heartbreaking watching them try and try again, both “naturally” and via in vitro methods (not literally “watching,” of course…).Eventually they adopted (two babies, several years apart), and nearly thirty years on, they’re quite happy with the results. So maybe I see the movie in the context of knowing real life people who created a family via adoption, since it was the only way they could. And no, it wasn’t simple or easy, but they and their two children would say it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.
Adoption can be a wonderful thing, no doubt. But it can also be incredibly fraught and expensive, it’s not the point of the movie and it’s really insensitive to say to people who are struggling with infertility.
I will speak to real life people as I choose, and I will yell at fictional, computer animated characters to ADOPT until I turn blue in the face.
You seem lovely. Have fun alienating people then!
The heartbreak of realising you’re unable to create a life with the person you love is not the same as simply “I want to raise a child”.
But what about the rest of the fucking movie? IT’s a sub-Dreamworks level talking dog movie after those first five minutes. Never has a movie dined out more on five good minutes. Take off your blinders and try watching the rest of it with fresh eyes.
I took my girlfriend (now wife) to see this on a first date. She cried so hard that I thought she was having some sort of medical emergency. This movie really checks off all the tear jerking boxes: Lonely Elderly people, kids, and animals.
Man, that kid’s blush when Ellie leads him away.
It was genius to include the animated short about storks before this film; it enabled small children to understand what was going on during Ellie and Carl’s montage without saddling their parents with preemptively having an awkward birds-and-the-bees chat with them.In my theater, I was sitting behind a mother with two boys, maybe between the ages of 3 and 6. During the montage when Ellie was unable to have a child, the older turned to his mom looking concerned and said, “she can’t have a baby?”. She shook her head and put her arm around him, he nodded, said “oh.”, and returned his attention to the screen without any further questions. If I hadn’t already been crying because of the movie, that would have done it.
Also, the spin-off short Dug’s Special Mission might be the funniest damn thing Pixar has ever produced.
what? Where can I find this????
Probably on the DVD, and definately on Disney +.
oh, good point about Disney+ I’ll have a look before I finally get around to cancelling it (after Hamilton airs!)
I love the little touch of Alpha always speaking in the present progressive. There’s no real reason for it, other than a dog not quite understanding the subtleties of human language.
Yeah, for sure. Kinda like how Dug has no idea how creepy it is to hide under someone’s porch because you love them.
Don’t forget Dug in R.
In the commentary, Docter talks about how he made sure there was no huge life-changing event that prevented them from ever taking the trip, and it was simply that “life got in the way” as it does for so many people. So we can identify with them even more.
Well, except for Ellie’s diagnosis — Carl had finally bought the tickets and everything.
Maybe if the guy had gotten a real job, he would have been able to take his wife traveling before they were old and gray.
Poe’s Law; I can’t tell whether you actually believe that.
I absolutely do. A reasonably intelligent person should not spend their whole professional lives merely selling ordinary balloons. Society requires more of us all.
Maybe if they lived in a reasonably intelligent country, they wouldn’t have had to blow their savings on a broken leg
All the more reason for him to support his spouse by seeking more qualified, better-paying jobs rather than larking his life away passing out balloons.
If you genuinely believe that society requires us to get high-paying jobs and we’re failure if we don’t, then I hope like fuck you don’t have any children, now or ever.
Is it society that demands you be an asshole, or are you doing that on your own?
Don’t be dense. Ellie worked as a zoologist, a job that could easily support a home-owning but childless postwar couple with enough money to take vacations.
So, why didn’t they? And, if they both wanted to become parents, but one was infertile for whatever reason, why not become foster parents?Nonsensical trite montage is nonsensical and trite. 😉
To quote the original post of this thread: “there was no huge life-changing event that prevented them from ever taking the trip, and it was simply that “life got in the way” as it does for so many people”
And, to quote my original reply, maybe if he’d done right by his wife and gotten a real job, life wouldn’t have gotten in the way.
my favourite Spencer Tracy/Kirk Douglas movie.OK, so what does the commentariat think of the rumour that the first draft had a very different ending: Carl is in the nursing home, and everything from the house floating away has been a fantasy. Talking dogs, weird birds, flying a house to South America – all a fantasy of what he’d wanted to do, as he was taken away from his home. Dark af but it explains those talking dogs and weird birds…
Kind of like the alternate ending to Get Out where he ends up in prison—I was just thinking about that the other day. In both cases, the correct decision was made. Jesus.
I actually just rewatched Get Out and preferred the alternate ending… it’s SO much more bleak and, sadly, realistic, and shows us what would, realistically happen after so many Horror films (“What’s that? A monster/immortal serial killer/family of mutant hillbillies killed all your friends and you’re the only survivor with no evidence for your story… would you mind accompanying us down to the station please sir/ma’am?”) only this time enhanced by the fact that Chris is black and, as established, would be under even greater suspicion.I do understand why Peele went with the ending he did though, and I don’t dislike it. I just like the other one more.
It is more realistic and bleakly so but man, we needed a win for black people (as a society – I’m not black, for the record)
I’m usually not a fan of “It was all a dream” type of reveals, but I am a fan of bleak endings. I dunno. I’m split on this one.
I think it’s a rumour that’s false. That’s the sort of ‘dark’ ending a film student would think was clever. Pixar aren’t afraid of putting darkness in their family films but there’s no way they were going to end their film with such a empty bait and switch.
Yeah, that “rumor” is obvious horseshit.
I think that fucking sucks. It’s an animated movie. It doesn’t have to make sense.
Actually as a fantasy it just needs self-consistency. For instance, even allowing that Frederickson could possibly inflate “enough” gallons to carry his house aloft in the first place, the house also loses elevation as it loses balloons.
I think it’s plausible. The DVD extras for Monsters Inc. (another of Pete Docter’s works, and in many ways my favorite Pixar film) had a feature on the early storyboards, and it was a very different movie. The little girl was a tween who was absolutely horrible to her little brother, the monsters just wanted to be left alone, and the conceit of the script (at that point) hinged on her realizing that she was the actual monster. It was through regular review sessions and iterative revision that they arrived at the much more effective final story.I feel we have a partial and flawed idea of creative genius, that it means getting things right on the very first try. Kind of like in Amadeus where we’re supposed to believe that Mozart’s symphonies just flowed out of him, perfect from the beginning. Scholars who have access to Mozart’s papers know, though, that he was always revising his work, and there’s a genius in the second or third draft, too. I think what makes Pete Docter great isn’t that his first instinct is always the correct one, but that he’s able to combine that first inspiration with feedback and other people’s perspectives and keep working on something until it becomes great. In short, I have no doubt that Up got better after the first draft. I don’t know that the initial draft was based on it all being a wonderful dream, but we can all be happy that they all kept working on the story and finding ways to make it better.
Yeah but that’s just a different plot. Completely pulling the rug from under the viewer after spending the full run time with the characters would be arbitrary and mean as hell.
If previous Pixar movies didn’t need to explain toys coming to life or a society of cars, I don’t see why this one would need a dream ending to explain a weird bird.Really, this is “originally the whole thing was the main character’s dying dream” thing is a persistent internet legend that’s been applied to hundreds of different cartoons, movies, and books for kids. It’s rarely actually true.
I probably haven’t explained it very well – the description I had read was quite long, with the first draft ending more reflective than a rug-pull “it was all a dream” punchline. It read kinda Citizen Kane – someone looking back on their life, realizing what was really important. I prefer where they landed, but there’s still quite a jolt when the tone shifts and the house takes off. If the first draft rumour is true, you can still see the joins.
Plus…why? You could do that for almost any movie. The Shyamalan twist is rightly mocked these days for being unnecessary and lazy.
I call bullshit. I don’t see Pixar considering anything as cliched and disappointing, especially at this stage in their run.
I guess because I’d heard about this scene over and over again, by the time I finally saw Up in like 2015 or 2016, it didn’t gut me as much as I expected.But I can’t not love this movie. Asner is perfect (it’s amazing he’s been playing gruff old guys for 40 years), the kid is suitably goofy, and while some people are annoyed with the talking dogs, I think they’re great. And I sat through the movie wondering if that was Kirk Douglas as Muntz only to find out it was Christopher Plummer, so, just as good, frankly (I don’t remember when Douglas had his stroke, and by the time I finally saw the movie I didn’t remember exactly when it came out, anyway).
I think they did that opening montage to make the kids care about the old man. Not sure it worked. But it had me crying hard. Reminded me so much of my parents.
2009 brought us so many great animated movies: Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, the Secret of Kells, and the first ten minute of Up!(It also had some duds, such as: the rest of Up.)
Whoa, I hadn’t realized how stacked that year was for animation. Secret of Kells is incredible.
And Ponyo was released in the USA
I remember the moment from that sequence where I really lost it: when they want to have children but learn they can’t (for reasons unexplained). I was pretty shocked that they would include something so adult in a movie ostensibly for children. If a kid asked what was happening in that sequence, what would you even say? How can you explain it without giving them way more information than they should have at that age? On the other hand, it’s a part of life for a lot of people and I have to give Pixar credit for being brave enough to include it.
That’s the bit that always gets me as well. The fact Ellie dies is sad and tragic and upsetting but – without taking away from those emotions – it’s inevitable that one of them will die before the other. Them not being able to have children is just heartbreaking.
“it’s inevitable that one of them will die before the other.”See the Jason Isbell song “If We Were Vampires,” which is the Up beginning with no dogs to help out later on.
Pixar’s never been afraid to take their stories to places kids won’t understand yet, if only briefly.
“Oh….no! Elastigirl?? You MARRIED Elastigirl??”(glances at offspring)“AND GOT BIZZ-AY!!”In an earlier version Syndrome discovered the family early and said “AND you had a kid??” But that wasn’t true to his character; he would not hold back, he would be crass at that moment.
re: if a kid asked: Probably I’d say something like, “She got sad news from her doctor. It looks like they were hoping to have kids, but it didn’t work out.” You can stay big-picture at the start. They’ll figure it out eventually.Meanwhile, for my own “reproductive health is complicated and feelings about it even more so” reasons, that is absolutely the moment where I started crying, too. It only got worse from there. And I was sitting in Pixar’s screening room at the time, since that was when I splurged and went to a charity screening at their studio (benefitting Emeryville public schools, which felt worth it). I was flat-out ugly crying and I hadn’t even brought tissues. Rookie move, there. Rookie move. :)(Best thing I saw while wandering around the atrium, incidentally: they were exhibiting production art from the movie, and my favorite thing was that they’d built a scale model of the house, to code, so that they could see it from all angles and accurately portray the construction even from the underside. It was displayed in a clear plexiglass cube so you could take a look at it from beneath, too. Cutest thing.)
I remember the moment from that sequence where I really lost it: when they want to have children but learn they can’t (for reasons unexplained). I was pretty shocked that they would include something so adult in a movie ostensibly for children. If a kid asked what was happening in that sequence, what would you even say? How can you explain it without giving them way more information than they should have at that age? On the other hand, it’s a part of life for a lot of people and I have to give Pixar credit for being brave enough to include it.
“Well, you see Timmy, sometimes life is just a cruel, unfathomable joke, and our existence on this bleak earth serves only as the hollow punchline for an inhumane God’s vile amusement. Do you want some more popcorn?”
Hot take: That montage was poignant and amazing, but the rest of the movie… just ok. Even ok-. It’s not that it can’t reach the emotional depth that they set up in the first minutes (it can’t, but that’s not the criticism), it’s just that in the end the plot is so… unimportant, to say a word. People just do stuff and move forward without a sense of purpose. There’s a reason people always mention the first 5 minutes and kinda forget the other 91.
I’m not in love with the rest of the movie (I so hear you), but to say the plot is “unimportant” isn’t really fair. On a motivation level, it’s easy to relate to wanting to uphold a promise, or fulfill someone’s dying wish. The sense of purpose is very there. Up also fits neatly into Pixar’s “buddy comedy” tradition, which is their bread and butter at this point. In the company of an unlikely friend, our protagonist gets to change and grow, all that good stuff. At the risk of talking myself into liking this movie, Up’s one other best scene, is it’s ending:
The odd title, “Up” is because of the balloons and carrying the house (nevermind the logic), but a better title might have been “Out” because this is about venturing out. Getting out there. Experiencing life. Carl is closed off and never leaves his home, going so far as to bring the whole damn thing with him on his one adventure. It gets damaged internally along the way. Balloons pop as he runs out of time. There are some nice metaphors here. If anything, my issue with Up is the shenanigans on their journey are kind of annoying. There was a bird protecting her eggs that the bad guy wanted or something? Whatever. Talking dogs are funni. Carl gets wrapped up in a plot that doesn’t really have anything to do with him, so the film feels thematically disjointed from some if its more interesting ideas.
Yeah, I can see that maybe unimportant was unfair, pedestrian maybe it’s the better descriptor. I just don’t feel a connection to it, there’s not enough to keep me invested in the characters. And also, I’m sorry, but that kid was really annoying.
Well, Out is actually the name of a new short they’ve made about a gay couple.
I’ll take it
I think I cried harder later in the movie when Carl finally looks through the photo album but that payoff was earned with this opening tear jerker.
Dealt with my own infertility issues for five years so this segment hits hard for me. I would send the scene to friends and family whenever they had trouble understanding or relating -it explains the pain so perfectly! Still makes me tear up to this day.
We saw this at one of the Dine-In theaters that were less common ten years ago. The first ten minutes was when I decided to never attend one of those friggin’ things again. The wait staff can try and be as inconspicuous as they can be, but the constant in-and-out of everyone bringing in refills, more ketchup, dessert, etc, is never not going to be a distraction. I could see the movie and knew that something special was happening, but it had no real impact on me. Went back and saw it by myself about a month later at a regular theater and I was a weeping mess, even knowing what what going to happen.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the film but that sequence might be the best Pixar has ever been.
Exactly this.
I saw Pixar Live at the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago. Each film had a montage on screen with a live orchestra playing a medley of the score. For Up they had a montage already. They had their score. They also had the good sense to put it just before the intermission so that 5,000 people had time to recover.
*sobbing* Judas!
“I will bring it back for SCIENCE!”
“He bravely…. goes AROUND Mount Everest!”
WHATAREYOUDOING?!!
Seriously, young Ellie is the best. If I’d met a girl like her when I was Carl’s age, I’d have fallen in love too.
You don’t talk much. I like you.
For the second day in a row I am responding to a Pixar article by saying that there’s no way I could watch this. That man looks exactly like my father. At least, like my father would look if he was a Pixar-animated character.
You should avoid Spencer Tracy movies.
No kidding.
The greatest moment in Up is at the climax, when Carl discovers the scrapbook Ellie kept of their life together and her exhortation for him to keep going without her. That just destroys me, every time. Carl throwing out all of the furniture so that he can keep going is maybe my favorite thing in the whole Pixar oeuvre.I remember seeing Up in the theater with some friends, and around that point the girl sitting next to me leaned over and told me briefly about her grandmother doing the same thing for her grandfather, which was very sweet, and also evidence that when I was 21 I was incredibly bad at picking up signals from the opposite sex.
I saw it on a plane and was ugly crying within minutes.The final shot also brought the tears.
What I also love about the movie is how quickly it then allows the audience to recover. After that moment of tragedy, the audience shouldn’t be in the MOOD for adventure. It’s why they usually save the gut-punch for the end. But after a montage of Carl’s morning, it transitions from tragedy to tragicomedy (Carl has trouble getting around his house, and pretty much everything sucks), allowing us a laugh or two, before finally letting the adventure begin.
The whole movie is a structural marvel. For me it’s probably the best screenplay Pixar has “shot.”
I still go with Wall-E for that crown, because the camera “moves” in a way that tracks live action cinematography. It has the animated equivalent of steadycam shots.
This sequence is my all-time favorite Pixar moment. And, as a dog person, how could I resist the rest of the movie? There’s a moment later in the film where the dogs steal the kid’s hot dog, that’s so funny and true to dog behavior. Plus, to this day, I give Dug’s voice to any dopey male golden retrievers I encounter. Up is a top three Pixar movie for me.
Charles Muntz has to be at least 100 years old, right? Probably closer to 110?
Also gives so much more meaning to Carl’s ubiquitous bowtie — he stopped wearing neckties after Ellie died.
Am I the only one who was asking myself, “Who is taking all these pictures?” I mean, did they hire a photographer to follow them around, taking photos of all their life experiences? I’d say it was a waste of money, but if it gave the guy a whole photo album of memories, I guess it was money well-spent.
We rewatched this at home early in the pandemic, and my kids watched, open-mouthed, as the opening sequence just destroyed me. They were touched by it, but I think this weapons-grade heartbreaker may actually require adulthood for maximum impact.
I don’t know what I cried harder at, the opening montage, or scene immediately after it, set to that a section of Bizet’s Carmen, that shows how Carl has transformed from a vibrant man full of life into a cranky grump using a conveyer belt to get down the stairs.I remember being surrounded by kids in the theater laughing at the stuck chair, and I just burst into a new wave of tears for the poor man. Fucking Pixar, playing us all like violins.
I agree with the majority consensus in the comments that Up isn’t really top tier Pixar, but often gets mistaken for it because of the 10 minute opening sequence. Nobody trying to sell this movie as a classic would ever be likely to link you to a different clip. Beyond the fifteen minute mark, it’s a quirky mismatched buddy comedy with talking dogs. It’s well made, but it’s not particularly special.
I feel there is a similar quality split in WALL-E. The film is incredible while the robots are on Earth, but the slapstick second half in space is nowhere near as good. Of course – that split happens so much later that WALL-E is still definitely in my top 3 Pixar films.
I agree. The other point in Wall-E’s favor is that the events on the spaceship are at least connected to the main characters. I know Mintz is mentioned at the beginning, but his actual character and actions (plus the crazy dogs) seem like they’re out of a different movie.
I didn’t see Up in theatres, but it’s also nice of them to put the scene that will absolutely wreck you at the start of the movie. My wife and I had to wait out the end of Coco’s credits on account of being complete messes due to the ending (aided by my grandmother with Alzheimer’s passing away not too long before).
NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE. I think I’ve only seen this once. It, and the last scene of Toy Story 3, destroy me in a way no other movie scenes do.
I’ve said since I first saw Up in the theatre that the opening sequence itself would be an award winning short film. It really is pretty much a perfect film on its own. And no, you won’t sucker me into watching in now. I don’t need those feels this week, not in the slightest.
Just watched the embedded video & am sitting here in tears.
Please note that not even being in a Costco watching the footage with the sound muted is enough to prevent the tears from happening.
I remember taking my daughter to see this (she was six at the time), only for her to lean over to me five minutes in and loudly whisper, “Mom! Why are all the grown ups crying? Mom? Are you crying? Why are you crying?” Shit, I’m crying just thinking about it now.What I love most about that montage is that the broadest strokes are happy. Carl and Ellie grew up friends, fell in love, got married, lived long lives together. That’s a pretty happy life, all things considered! And it’s more than a lot of people get. But the heartbreak reminds you that even in the happiest life there’s going to be sorrow.
Say what you like about the wackier latter portion of the film, the line, “I’ve only just met you and I love you” is 100% what a talking dog would say.
Here’s another tip – if you think the movie you’re going to is going to make you cry, go to a 3D showing. The tinted glasses are great for hiding tears. That said, audible sobs? You’re on your own. Maybe go to IMAX?
“Thanks for the adventure
Now go have a new one – Love Ellie”
If you’re not crying for the next five minutes, you’re a Russian Bot.
I saw this movie on a first date. I thought it was a safe choice.10 minutes in I’m not only crying, but I’m sobbing. I felt self-conscious, but I looked at my date and she was weeping too. I looked around and saw that practically the whole theatre was similarly choked up. Damn you, Pixar.The last scene isn’t mentioned as often – it shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s such a beautiful last image and emotive in its own right.