IMDb 8.3 / 10
Official trailer
Up is the Pixar film people cry about. The rating above is IMDb’s, not mine, since I haven’t watched this one, so the number comes from the crowd. Pete Docter directed with Bob Peterson, who also voices the dog. Ed Asner plays Carl Fredricksen, a seventy-eight-year-old widower who ties thousands of balloons to his house and floats away. Jordan Nagai plays Russell, the boy who’s on the porch when it lifts off. Christopher Plummer plays the explorer waiting at the other end.
It won the Academy Award for best animated feature and for Michael Giacchino’s score, and it was one of the rare animated films nominated for best picture. It made roughly $735 million worldwide.
I’ve only seen Up in pieces, the clips plus the long stretches of commentary people keep writing about it, and the pieces are enough to explain the fuss. The married-life montage moves me even pulled out of context. I’m warier of the back half, which by every account swaps a grown-up grief story for talking dogs and a giant bird, and that trade is why I haven’t committed to the full film.
The Setup
Carl and Ellie meet as children, both obsessed with an explorer named Charles Muntz and his lost world in South America. They marry, fix up an old house, and spend a lifetime saving for a trip to Paradise Falls that keeps getting postponed by flat tires, hospital bills and the ordinary cost of living.
Ellie dies. Carl is alone in a house surrounded by construction, facing a move to a retirement home, and he decides to keep the promise the only way left to him. He fills the house with helium balloons and flies it south.
Russell, an eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer working on his last merit badge, is on the porch when the house lifts off. The two of them arrive in Venezuela stuck with each other.
The Married Life Montage
The opening four minutes are what the film is known for. Carl and Ellie’s whole marriage plays out without dialogue: the house, the jobs, the jar of savings raided for emergencies, a nursery prepared and then emptied, and the slow arrival of old age.
It’s carried entirely by Giacchino’s waltz theme and by what the animators choose to show and not show. The loss of the baby is handled in two shots and no words. That’s braver than most live-action dramas manage. The two-shot handling of the baby is the choice I admire most in the whole sequence. A lesser studio would have given Ellie a speech or a crying scene. Docter trusts an empty nursery and a waltz to tell it, and that restraint is exactly why it hits me so hard. People who have never seen the rest of the film know this sequence. It’s studied in film schools, and it’s the reason the movie’s reputation sits where it does.
For Writers
Up establishes a whole marriage, its joys and its griefs, in four wordless minutes, then spends the rest of the film cashing that investment. An audience that understands what a character has lost will follow them anywhere. When you write, get the loss in early and concretely, so every stubborn choice afterward reads as grief instead of eccentricity. Write the scene that shows what your protagonist used to have. Put it as close to page one as you can, then let the rest of the book be what they do about its absence. Readers will forgive a difficult character if they know what made them that way.
Pixar in 2009
Up arrived in the middle of the strongest run any animation studio has had. WALL-E came out the year before, Ratatouille the year before that, and Toy Story 3 followed in 2010. Pete Docter had already made Monsters, Inc. and would go on to Inside Out and Soul. The studio’s pattern in that period was to take a premise a child could describe in one sentence and build an adult emotional problem underneath it. A rat who cooks. A robot alone on Earth. An old man who flies his house away.
Docter’s films in particular keep returning to memory, grief and what a person does with the time they have. Up is the plainest version of it, and the one that puts the loss right at the front.
For Writers
Pixar built its best run on premises a child can repeat in one sentence with an adult problem hidden inside. A simple hook buys you the room to be serious. When you write, find the one-line version of your story that anyone could retell, then load the weight underneath it where the reader discovers it themselves. Write your premise in fifteen words. If it needs more, the idea isn’t simple enough to carry what you want to put inside it.
Carl and Russell
Carl is grief in the shape of a man: square, fixed, snapping at everyone, guarding a house that’s really a shrine. Ed Asner’s voice does most of the work, and the design gives him the stance of a man who’s braced for impact.
Russell is the opposite, all noise and enthusiasm, and the film gives him a reason. His father has stopped showing up, and the merit badge he’s chasing is an excuse to matter to somebody.
The film smartly gives Russell a reason for all that noise. A kid chasing a badge because his father stopped showing up is sadder than anything in the adventure plot, and it keeps him from being a cute sidekick bolted onto an old man’s story.
The relationship deserves its ending because neither one is written as a lesson for the other. They irritate each other for most of the running time, and the affection arrives late and underplayed.
The Adventure
Once the house lands, the film turns into a chase across a tepui plateau, with a talking-collar dog named Dug, a giant flightless bird called Kevin, and an aging Charles Muntz who has spent decades in the wilderness protecting his reputation.
Muntz is a real villain. Plummer plays him as a man who set out to prove something and has long since decided that anyone who doubts him deserves whatever happens next.
The action is broad, and the dogs flying biplanes are pure cartoon. Some viewers find the second half a steep drop from the opening. Others take it as the film’s argument: Carl has to put down the house before he can live.
Up starts to lose me in its second half. Dogs flying biplanes is a fine joke for a nine-year-old, and I get the argument about Carl putting down the house, but after that opening I want the film to stay with the widower, and from what I’ve seen it would sooner chase a bird across a plateau.
Why the Score Is High
An 8.3 on IMDb puts Up among the best-rated animated films ever made, and the montage carries much of that on its own. Audiences remember the feeling it gave them and rate the whole picture accordingly.
Critics were nearly as warm. The best picture nomination was only the second for an animated feature after Beauty and the Beast, and the Cannes Film Festival opened with it, a first for an animated film. The most common complaint is the one already noted: the film never again reaches what it does in the first ten minutes. That’s a high bar to miss.
For Writers
The first ten minutes of Up are so strong that viewers measure the rest of the film against them. That’s the risk of a brilliant opening. Front-loading your best material sets the standard the reader will hold you to. When you write, make sure the promise your opening makes is one the rest of the book can keep, or hold some of that power back for later. Compare your opening chapter to your midpoint. If the midpoint feels like a different, weaker book, move some of that opening strength forward. An opening that outclasses the rest of the novel is a complaint waiting to be written.
What It’s About
Under the balloons it’s a film about the difference between a promise and a life. Carl thinks he owes Ellie a trip. What she left him, in the adventure book he finally opens, is permission to stop.
That reading moves me almost as much as the montage does. Ellie’s adventure book telling Carl he’s allowed to stop is a gentle, grown-up idea, and I wish more films about grief had the nerve to end on permission instead of a big rescue.
That reading is why adults respond to it. The children get a flying house, a big bird and talking dogs. The adults get a widower discovering he already had the adventure and missed noticing.
Whether the back half deserves the front is a matter of taste. What the film built in its first act is beyond dispute, and IMDb’s 8.3 reflects that.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Up spends four silent minutes buying the audience’s investment and then draws on it for eighty more. The technique is simple and hard: show what the character had, take it away without commentary, and let the absence explain every later choice. Give the reader the loss first. Everything the character does afterward will make sense without a word of explanation.
Is Up worth watching?
IMDb users have it at 8.3, it won two Academy Awards, and it was nominated for best picture, something that almost never happens to animation. The opening montage is the most praised sequence Pixar has produced.
There’s no rating from me on this page because I haven’t seen the whole film, so IMDb’s 8.3 stands in for mine. The opening ten minutes are the reason I’d send anyone to it, and my only hesitation about the rest is the dogs, the biplanes and a second half that trades a grieving man for a cartoon chase.
