Up

Pixar manages to blend outstanding animation technology with some of the best story tellers in the movie business.  The first thing you see when watching a Pixar movie is the animation.  Toy Story was groundbreaking in it’s use of computer animation, but Pixar has moved beyond that.  Sure, Ratatouille debuted incredible new fur rendering techniques, and there are shots in WALL-E that are indistinguishable from a photograph, but that is not where the magic in these films lies.  No, Pixar films feature stories that are new, and different, and they use all that fabulous technology to bring them to life.  WALL-E is a tearful romance, with no dialog or human characters for the first 45 minutes!  Ratatouille takes the rat, scourge of the kitchen, and turns him into the greatest chef in all of France.  That leaves, of course, the latest Pixar feature, released a few weeks ago in theaters (and, if you haven’t seen it, hopefully still is playing), Up.  Perhaps the most amazing part of the entire film is the first 10 minutes.

We are introduced to the main character, Carl, as a young boy and his childhood hero, the world famous explorer, Charles Muntz.  Then, the chance encounter with his childhood friend Ellie, an explorer like himself.  He promises her that some day they will follow in their hero, Muntz’s footsteps and journey to Paradise Falls.  As the timeline speeds up we see the passage of their lives.  Marriage, their day to day life, always planning to some day make the journey, but they never do.  Ellie passes on, and this is where the story begins, with an old man, alone in his little house.

Where it goes from there I don’t want to say.  That is the magic of this movie.  It begins when everything seems to have ended, and it has it’s own happy ending.  Thank you Pixar, for reminding us that life in an adventure and we should go out and have one.