Like its stablemate Wall-E, Pixar’s Up has two distinct elements – the beautifully melancholy and the borderline bonkers. Wall-E splits more easily down the middle, the first half being virtually silent and playing out across the ruins of Earth – the second a more cartoonish foray into outer space, onto a ship where humans have become bloated caricatures of the American obese.
As has been widely reported, the first 10 minutes of Up are beautiful, portraying the arc of a couple’s lives without sentimentality – and again, with little sound. The effect of this first section is more intense than its equivalent in Wall-E, as it has to form the emotional amchor for a considerably crazier adventure. This anchor – an old man’s regrets, learning to live again through a young boy’s enthusiasm – occasionally punctuates the rest of the story, but there’s something about the efficiency of those first ten minutes that feels manipulative. Not much, but a little – a bit like the end of Atonement.
Still, the details are so delightful that you barely care: Dug the talking dog, with his eager displays of affection for any human that crosses his path; Alpha with his misfiring vocal unit; Kevin the hapless tropical bird; the list is long. And of course it looks beautiful, which almost goes without saying for Pixar, but the fact that you can sit there and accept everything that happens speaks volumes to that (see Disney’s Tinker Bell And The Lost Treasure for comparison).
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 