... And Away

Pixar's Up starts out strong but falls flat.

by Sam Adams

[ City Paper Grade: B ]

Pixar's movies usually tug delicately at the heartstrings, but Up opens with a headlong lunge in their direction. Carl Fredericksen, initially voiced by Jeremy Leary, is an awkward, earthbound tot obsessed with the newsreel adventures of a Zeppelin-borne explorer. While playing airship with the aid of a single bright blue balloon, he encounters Ellie (Elie Docter), an equally gangly, equally obsessed girl, who has transformed an abandoned house into a make-believe aircraft of her own. The montage that follows compresses an entire life into a matter of minutes, from a youthful flirtation to marriage, pregnancy, adulthood and old age, including Ellie's miscarriage and her eventual death.

It's a striking opening, as heartbreaking as the farewell-to-childhood montage in Toy Story 2, and told with the economy and grace of Wall*E's most purely visual passages, and it eclipses instantly director Pete Docter's work on the subpar Monsters, Inc., which until Cars was the dimmest star in Pixar's firmament. Without a word of dialogue, Docter conveys the tenderness of a life lived in harmony, the disappointments weathered if never forgotten, the dreams more important in aspiration than in their fulfillment. It's a tremendous passage, one that the rest of the movie, perhaps not surprisingly, fails to live up to.

As an old man, now voiced with curmudgeonly impatience by Ed Asner, Carl is a hold-out, his two-story house the sole undeveloped plot in a maze of office towers. When a misunderstanding with a developer turns violent — a blow from Carl's walker draws blood — Carl is involuntarily committed to a retirement home, but he makes an escape with the help of a plethora helium balloons, taking his house with him.

The sight of Carl's modest dwelling floating among the skyscrapers is the kind of outsize symbol that Terry Gilliam has made his stock in trade, the badge of an irrepressible dreamer fighting the modern world and reality itself. But Up doesn't follow through on its promise. The moment the house lifts off, the movie drifts down to Earth.

Once he's aloft, Carl discovers that a roly-poly Cub Scout type named Russell (Jordan Nagai) has inadvertently stowed away on his porch, but Carl decides to follow through with his master plan anyway: to pilot his house to the South American landmark called Paradise Falls, where he and Ellie had always planned to visit but never did. It's a romantic notion, of course, but a trifle prosaic, enough so that incarnating it in the form of a flying house seems like overkill. Rather than a man with a mad vision, Carl seems like a lonely widower with an inconveniently large house tied around his waist.

The movie's problems multiply tenfold once Carl and Russell touch down on a South American mesa within sight of his goal, especially since it still has the better part of an hour to run. What has been to that point a bittersweet, absurdist fable hooks a left turn into a middling adventure story with rainbow-colored birds, talking dogs and a malevolent villain, all of which have next to nothing to do with Carl's original plight. What has distinguished Pixar's movies from the vast majority of Hollywood product, live-action or animated, is their ironclad devotion to story, deployed with a level of craft rarely seen since the end of the studio system. But Up feels jumbled and half-baked, a personal movie hijacked halfway through by the gods of commerce.

The movie's latter section has its charms, chiefly a dog — Dug, voiced by screenwriter and co-director Bob Peterson — whose ability to talk is not accompanied by an increase in brain power (which, insofar as talking dogs go, makes him oddly realistic). But after the depths explored in its opening reels, the rest of Up feels shallow and arbitrary by comparison. The air hisses out slowly, but eventually it just goes limp.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Up | Directed by Pete Docter | A Walt Disney release | Opens Friday at area theaters