Up (2009)

One of the most striking things about UP, Disney Pixar's latest triumph, is its pervasive sense of melancholy. While I never felt quite as emotionally overwhelmed as I did when watching "Wall-E," I was much more consistently filled with sadness and longing.

And therein lies the continued genius of the Pixar films, because my children laughed and were frightened and were alert and attentive to the film as though it was made just for them, while my wife and I got something completely different out of it: missing our grandpas and taking a new look at profound depth of companionship in a marriage. I daresay that every married couple needs to see this movie. While I haven't seen "Fireproof" yet, (the Christian film lauded for its impact on refocusing one's marriage), I could easily make a case for UP as its secular equivalent.

All of the adventure and excitement in UP is derived from sadness. Carl Fredrickson, the central character, is as unwilling to budge from the home he made with his now-dead wife as Walt Kowalski/Clint Eastwood was in "Gran Torino." You almost expect Carl to say "get off of my lawn" when construction crews pillage everything around his lot and wait for him to leave, but Ed Asner's take on the character is a much more sweet sort of grumpy.

When Carl does finally give in and move, it's because he can no longer secure the safety of the home and grounds he created with his wife. They are what's left of her, so he attempts to relocate them to an entirely different continent by uplifting the house with balloons. (Isn't animation great?) It is at this point that Carl gets a boy sidekick and some animal friends to keep the kids interested. They are needed foils for comic relief, because the film has two nemeses that are among Disney's most frightening: Carl's former childhood hero (played deliciously by Christopher Plummer) and mortality itself.

The visuals of UP are as stunning as we've come to expect from Pixar. And while I did not see the film in 3-D because I hate 3-D, please believe me when I tell you that you do not need it. You don't need pop-out gimmickry to interfere with what's important, and that's the storytelling.

What I liked best about UP, though, is the final message it left in my mind. Ultimately, I found this to be a film about how we place such value in objects and how, ultimately, our experiences and memories hold more value than any object ever could. It is the destruction of an object at the beginning of the film that pushes Carl over the edge. And over the course of the film, Carl's rough adventure causes him to damage or lose many other artifacts that either belonged to his wife or reminded him of her. In the end, he realizes that she was always with him, material possessions or not. And this is what finally frees Carl to move on to the next adventure. UP might just offer viewers the most useful lesson ever written into Pixar's magic.

3.5 out of 4