My favourite film of the year: Up

There were moments while I was sat in the cinema during a near empty late night screening of Up, when I felt convinced that I hated the people – whoever they were – behind the film. How could they, I thought, how could they choose to make me feel like this? Why would anyone want to make me feel this sad? There are also moments when I felt convinced that I might be looking at one of the best pieces of art this year.

Either of those feelings maybe an exaggeration, or a mistake. You see, Up left me feeling confused. Before the film started I knew very little about the story that I was going to watch. I’d heard a couple of people say very complimentary things about it, but for whatever reason media coverage, reviews, analysis of the latest Pixar production had on the whole passed me by. In other words I didn’t have any expectations of the film. When I left the cinema I felt broken – my throat was sore from holding back streams of tears. I was also amused – I remember laughing at how my emotions had been utterly ambushed by a brightly coloured kids’ film.

I guess it’s sometimes hard to not to take your own emotional baggage into a cinema (or into any piece of art for that matter) and inadvertently project it onto the characters on screen, have it bounce back, and then again, so that you end up with a constantly bouncing reflection that relays back and forth between whatever emotions are currently testing you and the emotions that are being played out on screen. I’m guessing that that might be some of the reason why the movie affected me so much; although not entirely. A large part was also the subtly wonderful writing of Up.





Carl Fredricksen is a widow stuck in the boredom and sadness of bereavement. I know – I just read that sentence back and thought to myself: kids’s film??? He lives alone in the house that he and his late wife proudly bought when they first married. Alone for the first time in years Carl realises that his days have become nothing but lonely, boring, predictable routines. Each morning he wakes up, gets dressed, goes outside onto his porch, and just sits. He has nothing else to do but sit and ponder the dreams and goals that he had as a young man, that have now vanished.

Without giving anything else away – or at least anything outside of the film trailer – Carl manages to make an attempt at living his dreams. He manages to lift his house out of the every day (and the clutches of a development company who plan on bulldozing it) by inflated thousands of balloons (before retirement he had made his living on a balloon stall). Aided by a local little boy – a Wilderness Explorer – called Russel (who happens to be standing on the porch when the house lifts off) – Carl finally manages to make the trip of a lifetime towards South America where he hopes he will be able to land on Pacific Falls – a place that he and his late wife Ellie used to dream of.

In terms of the story – I’ll leave it there. There is of course the usual mix of bad guys, chases, close calls, jokes, etc that a Disney film needs. But what stands out is the classiness and depth to some of these elements and the way in which they are utilized. When we came out of the film my friend Sian commented on how she thought it was really good that a film like Up was made. I couldn’t agree more. This film deals with sadness, loss, death – i.e. the big ones. I guess animated films have always done that (think Bambi’s mother being shot in the skull), but with Up, for some reason, you just really, really feel it. The attention paid to the minutiae of all the characters’ personalities is evident. In a single tired, creaky walk you can feel so much for Carl Fredricksen. You feel sorry for him, at times you feel frustrated by him, the main thing is: you genuinely care about him. I found myself caring about Carl Fredricksen in a way that I rarely do feel about characters in films.

Up also messes around with the usual ideology of kids’ films. It raises questions about the idea of heroes. Fredricksen finds out that his own personal idol is in fact a mean selfish brute who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. However even within this there are some interesting narrative twists (the reasons behind the villain’s evilness are things like pride, the expectations of others, his inability to live without the validation of others). There are several hints at other worldviews which the filmmakers seem to have slipped in also, for example, the head of the construction company that wants to bulldoze Carl’s house is the personification of the notion of a faceless large corporation – his face is completely free from expression or physical features.

One of the things that really saved me with Up (and also convinced needy old me that the filmmakers didn’t actually hate me) was the humour. There are points in Up when I laughed out loud. Within the sadness that the film manages to conjure – I felt like I really needed those laughs. I felt like I owed the dogs big time–the lovable Dug especially. After you’ve been feeling so sad, the laughs are like ecstasy or something.

I’ve managed to go through the whole thing without saying just how lovely the film looks as well. But yeah, there you go – my favourite film of the year