The Helium Is The Message

Up begins so poignantly — with a beautifully conceived montage showing childhood sweethearts Carl and Ellie Fredricksen marrying, building a house, dreaming of having children and traveling to far-off locations but never quite managing either feat — that it’s a little surprising to see it climax high above the clouds with a wild action sequence involving a zeppelin, a Boy Scout, several hundred balloons, an exotic South American bird, and a pack of talking dogs. Even more startling: it all feels part of the same wonderful movie, one in which even the most mundane object — a bottlecap, a tennis ball, a garden hose — can take on huge emotional significance. When Ellie dies, she leaves behind a childhood scrapbook with a page optimistically labelled “STUFF I’M GOING TO DO.” Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, Up’s co-directors, must have filled several similar scrapbooks with their plans for the stuff they wanted to include in this movie, and it feels like they found a way to cram pretty much all of it in.

But at its heart, Up’s story is pretty simple — it’s basically David Lynch’s The Straight Story, only with a lot more helium. Like Richard Farnsworth’s Alvin Straight, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) is an old man who needs to make an epic voyage and, without access to conventional transportation, resorts to other means of completing it. Alvin hops on board a riding lawnmower, while Carl prefers the more outré house-carried-aloft-by-a-bunch-of-balloons method. Both men know they look slightly ridiculous, but it’s a journey they have to make to give their lives closure before they die — Alvin needs to reconcile with his estranged brother, while Carl needs to prove to himself that Ellie’s spirit of adventure is still alive within his own heart. I like to think Lynch would approve of Up’s dotty brand of all-American surrealism — or at least identify with the Boy Scout character.

So many people have already written reviews praising Up so lavishly that, just for the sake of not merely echoing them, I feel obligated to come up with a few criticisms. Here’s a few I was able to think of:

• Docter and Peterson cheat a little near the end when they show the 78-year-old Carl performing several deeds far beyond what he ought to be physically capable of, sacrificing plausibility for a few more action “beats.”

• The “talking dogs” device has been conceived a little inconsistently. In the film, Carl encounters several dogs that have been outfitted with collars that translate their thoughts into human speech. Sometimes these thoughts are quintessentially “doggy” — “I just met you and I love you already!” “Squirrel!” — but I’m not quite as sold on the scenes showing groups of dogs chatting and conspiring with each other. It seems like we’re just seeing the kind of talking dogs we’d see in any conventional cartoon, if that makes sense, rather than hearing dog-talk translated into English.

• And I guess if you wanted to, you could fault Up for being too entertaining. In one scene, Russell, the Boy Scout who tags along on Carl’s balloon voyage, talks about hanging out with his father and observes, “It’s the boring stuff I think I remember most.” Up resolutely avoids including any “boring stuff” — even sentimentally eliding most of Carl and Ellie’s adult relationship, preferring to show them as adorable kids and adorable old people.

I could make that last argument, but I don’t really believe in it — I mean, what kind of person thinks, “Pixar, you really should stop making your movies so completely delightful”? Probably the same kind of person who’d see a house floating across the sky suspended from a bunch of balloons and immediately reach for their BB gun.