Up lifting

In theaters Friday: Old Dogs, The Road, Ninja Assassin

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Angels & Demons, Four Christmases, Funny People, Kobe Doin’ Work

Sometimes I think the less I know about the personal life of an artist or musician whose work I admire the better. Their accomplishments should stand on their own, really, and the more I know the greater the odds are that I’ll discover something bothersome. Pete Doctor and Bob Peterson’s recent Disney Pixar film Up (out now on DVD) has something similar to say about heroes: There’s always a downside, and discovering that downside can also be dangerous. Up, it turns out, has a lot to say about life in general; what’s truly important and how to enjoy it. Forget the charge that Where the Wild Things Are is handicapped by melancholy, much of Up is threaded with an undercurrent of life-shattering loss and longing from beginning to end, and still it works perfectly well as a family film suitable for the kiddos as well as the parents. At least, as long as the parents come prepared with age-appropriate answers or limber moves to dance around the inevitable questions about miscarriage.

As Wall-E meditated on and satirized serious environmental and social issues, Up takes a good hard look at what it means to lose someone important in one’s life, and how to cope without a spouse or a father figure. And it does so by telling an exhilarating adventure story worthy of Robert Louis Stevenson or C.S. Lewis. Ed Asner’s voice stars as Carl Frederickson, a 70-something widower who slowly watches his neighborhood turn into a strip mall as he wiles away the hours pining for his late wife Ellie, a firecracker who did most of the talking and dreaming in their relationship since they met as thrill-seeking young kids. Ellie and Carl had always wanted to follow in the brave footsteps of renowned explorer Charles Muntz to Paradise Falls in a remote and gorgeous cranny of South America. Carl had the flight booked when Ellie falls ill in the opening montage.

Fast forward a few years, and just moments before Carl is escorted to an assisted living facility, he unleashes a secret fleet of a thousand helium balloons tethered to his house that lifts off like Dorothy’s crib in The Wizard of Oz. He’s going to fulfill Ellie’s dream and reach Paradise Falls before he dies. But before lift-off, a young, inquisitive Boy Scout named Russell, who Carl had shooed away during an ill-conceived attempt to earn a “Helping the Elderly” merit badge, inadvertently stowed away under the porch of the house. So Carl and Russell, a clever odd couple, are off on the adventure together to discover Paradise Falls and all of the perils that come with flying thousands of miles in a house buoyed only by latex balloons, including an unexpected meeting with Carl’s childhood hero, explorer Charles Muntz.

Up is the shortest title Pixar has given to any of its films, and it is no coincidence that it is its most focused work. There are only four main characters, and two dominate the 90-minute running time. Until Up, most animated films seemed to have three goals: teach children a life lesson—a moral of the story, if you will— entertain them for over an hour, and also throw a few laughs at the parents to they don’t fall asleep. Now, Pixar has finally made a film that’s more likely to teach the parents something that the kids aren’t ready to grasp yet; that life goals can change, that people matter more than popularity, that gratitude is a rare and precious commodity. As such, Up can be challenging at times, but by the end, its life-affirming message is as uplifting as a thousand balloons.