On 3D digital projection at the Ziegfeld with Lucía, Chris, and Mai, on 29 May 2009 at 21:30.
One remarkable thing that Up and WALL•E have in common is that they both open with almost entirely dialogue-less expositions. The opening of Up, in particular, is a something of a charming but sad short film. Indeed, Up must have a record for having made so many people cry so quickly. Everyone at the Ziegfeld was sniffling at the end of it when a young child asked out loudly, “what happened?”, and the entire theater burst out laughing. It was quite a moment.
That opening short film was a masterwork in its own right.
From there, the film is in turns funny, fantastic, exciting, cute, and more than a little ridiculous. Certainly it was a notch above your average Pixar film (and that’s high praise indeed).
I don’t think this film compares so well to Ratatouille in terms of its inventiveness or WALL•E and Monsters Inc. in terms of sheer imaginativeness. Despite the fact that it’s an immersive, imaginative film, it does seem almost somewhat conventional compared to a lot of the other Pixar films. Archetypal egomaniacal bad guy, running jokes with talking dogs, uninspiringly predictable action sequences (it is a children’s film, after all, so these are pretty easy to forgive). That said, the portrayal of Fredricksen is so human that it goes beyond anything else Pixar has ever done and I can only really compare it to Miyazaki. The other characters aren’t more than paper-thin, but really, other than Russell, the only other main characters are a talking dog and a large bird (they provide little more than plot movement and comic relief), so that’s understandable. The film is really about Fredricksen.
Fenton’s is probably the biggest props to Emeryville (well, Oakland) that Pixar has given since The Incredibles action scenes along San Pablo and around the Embarcadero. Pretty awesome.
I guess for me there’s no one great Pixar film. There are those with remarkable storytelling (Ratatouille, The Incredibles), those that are truly imaginative depictions of an alternate world (Monsters, Inc., WALL•E, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, and even Cars), those with memorable characters and relationships (Monsters, Inc.), those with something to say about the world (WALL•E, The Incredibles), etc. In combination these films represent a truly remarkable output, and the fact that many consider Cars to be their worst film illustrates the incredibly high standard they’ve set for themselves (I would take Cars over all but the finest of Disney films, and over pretty much anything from Dreamworks or Sony’s animation studios). But somehow I feel they never quite reach the profound level filmmaking that Miyazaki’s better films represent. Up represents something of a new direction (a little less focus on imaginativeness and fantastic visualization), and despite what I perceive to be its flaws, it does give me hope that their films will continue to be as fresh as ever for some time to come.
Up was a wonderful film that carries on the Pixar tradition in a splendid way, and I’m sure I’ll see it many more times and have more opportunities to reflect on it. But it wasn’t quite the film I wanted it to be.
Lucía: A+
Jun-Dai: B+
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