Up - Movie Review

                                                                            

Rated PG (for action and peril). Comedy Starring Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, John Ratzenberger. Directed by Pete Docter.

Ed Asner lends voice talent to the wistful and occasionally melancholy tale of an old man's efforts to float his home to a remote South American cliff on a bouquet of helium-filled party balloons. Along the way, he meets a young scout looking to earn the final good-deed badge on his uniform, a giant presumed-to-be-extinct bird, and a band of dogs with electronic speech-enabled collars that grant them the ability to speak to humans as well as to each other.

One of the most astonishing and accomplished characteristics of the film is its ability to swing from one emotional tone to the next. The film begins rather playfully, then becomes bittersweet, tragic, angry, then optimistic and adventurous, before cycling through various arrangements of these emotional chords again. Pixar, the creators of the film, and now affiliated with Disney, once again lend their keen story sense to a film that could have been a simple action/adventure film with little depth.

The film has been a smash hit, about to cross the $300 million mark in box office grosses, and was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture for 2009. It's truly a film for the whole family that feels like it's genuinely about something, not just giddy cartoon characters cracking jokes and going from one chase scene to another. The story focuses on such tough subjects as how to deal with the pain of mourning a loved one, and goes on to show how attitude is everything, and that the world often supports and favors those with crazy, ambitious ideas.

Grade: B+

Article Source: B. Nathan