MALLINation

Pixar's Up

The image of a squarefaced old man dragging his hovering house behind him through a dreamscape  jungle feels pulled straight out of the deepest Fruedian recesses of the unconscious. Pixar’s latest triumph, Up , is packed with such images, along with the considerable voice talent Ed Asner as the old guy, Carl Fredrickson.

One of the great things about Pixar’s best films is the sense that they are oxymorons – big-budget, auteur flicks with wide-ranging appeal. From the first moments of Up, which mimic a pre-World War II newsreel, the sense that pure imagination is at work predominates. Imagine a meeting at most major studios where the word “newsreel” is used in reference to an animated big-budget tentpole.”Kids don’t know what that is!” “We need to start with a bang!”

Up does start with a bang all right, but it’s an emotional one – a 15 minute long sequence that plays almost as a riposte to Synechedeche N.Y.’s sprawling discourse on how art can represent a human life. Up director Pete Doctor encapsulates the entire history of Carl Fredrickson and his wife Ellie, packing it with emotional resonance, all without saying one word. There was barely a dry eye in the house.

This prelude is so powerful that it threatens to unbalance the rest of the film, but it also gives an emotional weight and meaning to the house, the mailbox, a soda pop cap, that otherwise might seem forced or contrived.  This in turn leads to Fredrickson attaching the hundreds of balloons to his house that allow him to fly off, with a roly-poly kid stowaway aboard.

This sets up a secondary psychological struggle as Frederickson has to struggle with his hero worship of a long-lost explorer while also coming to grips with his life as a widower. Oh, and there are talking dogs and a magnificently plumed bird named “Kevin.”

Don’t get the wrong idea though – this isn’t heavy going. The movie is as bouyant as it’s title, helped in no small measure by it’s snappy pacing and witty screenplay.