Up

I won't deny that I am a contrarian when it comes to popular tastes, depending on the local context of popular. There was a time that I tried to dislike Pixar films because I was so swamped with adoration for the films that I thought were mediocre, like Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo. They are both great movies but not quite as good as the voices close by made them out to be, yet upon entering graduate school in Arizona, I noticed that ideological criticism reigned supreme, and Pixar (especially from its association with Disney) became a target of knuckleheads ready to point out the absence of women heroes, racial diversity, and conservativism. From that spirit, I began to defend Pixar, especially as The Incredibles first entered the scene, with its Ayn Rand-ish message (albeit more subtle) and traditional family values, favorite targets of the unenlightened. I am not totally opposed to ideological criticism, and I love to pull it out when in discussions about The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, both of which are kind of lame anyway so I don't feel too bad about it. I also have ideological criticisms of Beauty and the Beast in my contrarian bank, but the movie is so damn good that I prefer to leave them there.

Since the Incredibles, it seems that Pixar has been on a roll of rolling out movies that are so far superior to other films that I have considered making them course requirements. My personal feeling is that Pixar reached its peak with Ratatouille, which is a downright masterpiece, but the latest two films have been as close to a plateau as Mesa Verde. I am going to leave Wall E for another post because my friend Bryan (with a y not an i) needs to lay down his own critical apparatus to deflate it, but I saw Up last Saturday, so I can quickly comment on that. 

Having spent 20 dollars to take both kids to Up, I was either going to love it or hate it with an ardency that only comes when I spend more than 10 dollars on something. But because I got my 20 dollars worth in the first 20 minutes of the film, I could happily enjoy the rest of the movie without further reservations. In fact, the first 20 minutes were so moving that it took me the rest of the movie just to come down and shore up the tears of aesthetic joy. If Wall E is about romance, the kind that is so true that only robots could depict it (see my earlier comments on allegory), Up is about marriage, the kind that is so real that only a montage could depict it. This thematic movement is a nice trend--the next Pixar film, if all goes according to my plan, should be about childrearing. Up tried to approach that topic but was not as successful, principally because the film knew it was all about marriage and other topics weren't going to be dealt with as well. 

The film as a whole is good enough--it is funny and nice to look at, full of little moments that provide the vagus nerve with enough juice to get through the less-appealing action sequences. Here are two observations though: the kid in the movie, who has all the makings of one of those really annoying characters in animation that says crazy things and mugs endlessly, has a personality that reveals the charms beneath the annoyance. Not once did I really want him off the screen, which was an unexpected reaction for me. The other observation is that each character seems to have weight. One of the problems with computer animation is that it creates a kind of weightlessness that removes the stakes from the action, but the characters and objects in this movie, with the exception of the exotic bird Kevin, feel like gravity actually pulls them. After all, this movie is all about weight and weightlessness, which is why the child needed to be overweight: the metonymic relationship between actual weight and "weight" as in burdens are always collapsing to make the action and images more poignant. The story constantly turns on how much weight both the balloons and Carl Frederickson can carry, and the only way to move the house was to balance human weight and the upward force of the balloons. The symbolism is at times a bit heavy-handed, but that is necessary, in my opinion, for an adolescent's understanding of the literary weight of the film, so to speak. The movie's title not only refers to the possibilities of weightlessness but also nicely puts two letters together that look an awful lot like the characters: Carl and Elie in "U" form (two lines joined at the bottom), and Russell as a small "p." This might look silly, but the textual appearance of the word frequently appeared in the visuals, whether intentionally or not, and I kept thinking about it while watching. The movie is that good. 

I don't want to make the movie sound like a chore though--it's not. In fact, Pixar's latest films have understood the enchanting power of narrative as well as most children's books, and it makes them much better for it. A good children's book tells a story with just enough words to move the pictures along, and it doesn't waste time with self-conscious jokes and metanarrative winks."Where the Wild Things Are" is a good example of this: the book's white space (where the words are to go) is gradually overtaken by the imaginative illustrations to the point where the words disappear completely. Only when Max feels like exiting his own imagination do the words start to reappear and the white space returns. I have never heard anybody adequately explain why that book is so powerful, but I would suggest that it is precisely because it is about imagination itself, while it allows the reader to cognitively do what Max is doing, with few words to muddle it up. This, it seems to me, is part of the Pixar formula, or at least it has been for the latest three films. Now if only Dreamworks could start rethinking their brand of cool self-consciousness and allow their characters to shut up for a while, we might have more than one worthy computer-animated movie a year.