Up

Higher and higher: An old man, a boy, and a talking dog take a fantastical voyage as only Pixar can imagine

May 29, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

I think we can safely say at this point that Pixar has entered its Baroque period. When "Toy Story" came out in 1995, who would have guessed that within 15 years the company would be creating the richest, most resonant entertainments in Hollywood - on such subjects as culinary rats and a robot sentinel left in charge of a junkyard Earth? There is nothing, it seems, John Lasseter's house of soulful computer artisans can't do.

Which is why "Up" comes as a shock. Its ambitions are emotional and visual rather than thematic, but on the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay. It's a wonderful movie - fit for the whole family and for once I mean that as praise - but it doesn't seem designed for a higher purpose the way, say, "WALL-E" did. "Up" is a breather, a respite, a romp, but one with infinite shades of feeling.

Most bizarrely - at least, to those who make their business selling plastic superheroes to our children - the hero is an old man. A very old man. Carl Fredericksen (voiced by Ed Asner, his Lou Grant snarl undimmed by time) is a crotchety widower whose cube-shaped face sits atop his wizened frame like a bobblehead. In an elegant visual touch, he has been given the white hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses of the late-era Cary Grant. Carl doesn't like much in this modern world, and in the opening moments of "Up," we learn why.

Those first scenes function as both a prologue and a life story compacted into 10 breathtakingly beautiful minutes - it's a Pixar short, really, and possibly the best the company has ever done. We see the young Carl, shy and entranced by 1930s newsreels of explorer Carl Muntz (Christopher Plummer), fall in with a delightful gap-toothed tomboy named Ellie. Time gracefully elides and they grow, marry, keep house, a world unto themselves. Then Ellie passes, and Carl is left with the dreams of the South American adventure they never took and a ramshackle home surrounded by urban towers. There's no place to go but, well, you know.

In its fantasy of geriatric escape, "Up" taps into a discontent our youth-obsessed culture rarely notices. The film's smart enough, though, to pack a stowaway: Russell (Jordan Nagai), an egg-shaped little kid and enthusiastic Wilderness Explorer looking to get his elderly-assistance merit badge. The duo's journey by balloon-lofted house is exciting and funny and just when you wonder where it's going to lead, the movie dumps us into a make-believe South American wonderland. There be monsters here, and one of them's a person.