It Takes a Lot of Effort to Make It Look So Effortless

Pixar continues to evolve. I really expected a letdown after the masterful Wall-E. I would have forgiven Pixar if Up had been a lesser film. But no these guys refuse to relent. Here's the most successful U.S. animation studio both commercially and artistically of the new century and they are still willing to try things that their rivals wouldn't even begin to think about. What other studio would be brazen enough to attempt to include (let alone integrate into a single project) the following in what is ostensibly a kid’s film: a septuagenarian hero; a scene depicting a woman’s infertility and her subsequent emotional recovery from said; a funeral? Exactly what is Up? A kid's film about loss, letting go and embracing non-traditional ideas of family. Yeah, maybe Dreamworks will touch on some of these themes in Shrek 4.

Even if the film turned out to be a disaster, I'd give them props for the attempt. Luckily, it's nowhere near that. Instead it's a minor masterpiece with some of the most sumptuous visuals ever seen in a computer-animated film. It doesn't even need the state-of-the-art visuals, because these guys just know how to tell a story. Almost from the opening sequence, you can tell how much the creators care about their creations. There's more character development in the first five minutes of Up than in the entire bloated two-and-a-half plus hours of TF2. The film never resorts to cheap scatological humor which is rare these days for, well, almost any film with comedy in it, animated or otherwise. It earns its moments. Sure it's emotionally manipulative, but all works of fiction are. That's the point. It's just with the best ones, you don't notice.

Still for all the accolades critics have almost universally heaped upon Pixar, I still think they have room to grow. I don't think they've made a film that matches the limitless inventiveness and bravura display of imagination embodied in Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. But that's a good thing. It gives me something to look forward to.