Up Review

The opening is the most discussed four minutes Pixar has ever made and it deserves the attention. Carl and Ellie meet, marry, fail to have a child, save for a trip they never take, and then she is gone, all of it without dialogue, carried by Michael Giacchino's waltz and a run of cuts that trusts the audience completely. It is a compressed life, and it does what animation exists to do, which is reach somewhere live action cannot.

Then the film has to be a movie. What follows is charming, funny and considerably more conventional: a talking dog, a lost explorer with an airship, a chase across a plateau. The collars are a great joke and Dug is genuinely funny. Ed Asner gives Carl a stiffness you can hear in the voice, and the design thinking, a square old man and a round boy set against a floating box of primary colors, is the sort of work Pixar was doing better than anyone alive.

The reservation reviewers kept raising is that the villain is thin and the third act settles into standard adventure beats once the house is airborne, and that is fair. The picture never returns to the register of the prologue and probably could not. It won the animated feature Oscar and a Best Picture nomination in the same year, and the consensus has stayed close to universal since.