Up To the Task

Talking "simplexity" with the director of Pixar's newest flight of fantasy.

by Molly Eichel

BIG UPS: Up director Peter Docter goofs around with voice actor Jordan Nagai.

Pete Docter looks like he could be a character in one of his films.

The director of Up, and previously Monsters, Inc. , is tall and lean, with goofy ears that stick out from his face and cartoon eyes that light up when he gets animated about his subject matter — animation. He makes sounds effects — growling to signify Up's grouch of a protagonist — and sketches out the answer to a question about the shapes of his characters.

His partner in crime, Up's producer Jonas Rivera, is similarly energetic. He still has the enthusiasm of the intern he started out as, even though he has elevated himself to bigwig status. Together, the filmmakers sound like two kids who've been let loose a set of very expensive toys.

Despite the common notion that animation is child's play, neither Docter nor Rivera think their movie is necessarily meant for children. Up is about 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), who sets out to escape a world that no longer seems to have a place for him — with the help of several hundred helium balloons that he affixes to his house. His destination: South America, where he's dreamed of going since the passing of his beloved adventure-seeking wife, Ellie (voiced by Docter's own spouse, Elie).

But death isn't the only sensitive subject that Up tackles. In an stunning expository montage of the Fredericksens' life, we see Ellie suffer a miscarriage, find the couple's quaint neighborhood overrun by skyscrapers and watch the two as they give in to old age.

"It's a little like that Walt Disney quote where he says something like, 'We don't make our movies for kids, we don't make our movies for adults. We make our movies for the child part in each one of us that maybe that world has caused us to forget about but our films could help us remember,'" Docter says. "We're not aiming for 6-year-olds. We're just trying to make films that speak to us as the first audience knowing that it's going to go out there to the rest of the world."

Pixar has a track record for making movies marketed toward children, so the idea of a septuagenarian being able to hold a young theater-goer's attention is a daunting one. So Docter and Rivera simply tried to make him as funny and relatable as possible. "We've done it with mice — well, rats, which is even more extreme. Bugs and fish and monsters and all that other stuff, so why not a man?" says Docter, who adds that Carl is modeled after the likes of ultimate curmudgeon Walter Matthau and Spencer Tracy (the likeness to the latter is uncanny). Rivera calls Carl the "greatest hits of our grandfathers."

But Carl needed a foil to keep him from becoming a hermit, to keep him grounded even when he was floating above the clouds. Enter Russell, a Boy Scout stowaway in Carl's floating house. Russell is actually the addition of Tom McCarthy — director of The Station Agent and The Visitor. McCarthy was brought in when Docter's co-director, Bob Petersen, was taken off Up to work on Ratatouille. But McCarthy's involvement is not that unusual, considering the subject matter of his more serious films. As Docter says, they all just boil down to "a loner who ends up with this oddball family that helps him reconnect to the world."

But Carl is meant to connect to a world that is decidedly less realistic, in least in look, than most Pixar fare. You could see the individual hairs on Remy's body in Ratatouille, and Wall-E is simply a visual masterpiece. But Up's look is more simplistic. "We found it was actually harder for the computers. On Ratatouille, all the tailoring and simulation was working perfectly. No, we didn't want it to work perfectly," says Rivera. "We wanted it to be caricatures. We didn't want to have 300 folds, we wanted to have one. We came up with the term 'simplexity,' because this was a little harder, a little slower for the computers. They were all so proud that they could make anything look real and then we were, like, 'We don't want it to look real.' It was redefining our tool set as a studio."

(molly.eichel@citypaper.net)