Half-Masked

Picture courtesy of Pixar, blogues.cyberpresse.ca.

“Up” surprised me, which rarely happens for me at the movies anymore. It is not only cheerful fun, but surprisingly attentive to the shortcomings and heartache Real Life is prepared to offer. Because it is a family-oriented animated film, you should know what to expect. I can confirm it involves a chipper and grumpy Odd Couple, fish-out-of-water cast who get into inexplicable chase scenes, along with colourful animal sidekicks that will become the favourite characters of everyone who sees it. If this sounds familiar, it means you’ve seen at least one other Disney film before. But because this is also a Pixar feature, it knows when and how to twist the familiar into something unusually involving, and richly understanding.

Do not underestimate this one, as I did. I said months back that “Up” looked like “a Dreamworks movie“. Having seen it, I stand by this statement. But it is a very good Dreamworks movie, a “Shrek 1″ if you will. Perhaps it is not as engaging or inventive as Wall-E, it is more routine and by-the-numbers. But they are the right numbers for this film. It is a pleasant movie that allows its characters some humanity in-between cute comic relief and nonstop, time-padding action and adventure.

If I could change anything about it, I would have more of the former and less of the latter. I think when the main character of a big-budget animated Disney film is a gray-haired, nonathletic Ed Asner, that is interesting enough. I don’t really need any death-defying blimp showdowns. If nothing else, the intensity here might be better than what you’re getting with the latest from Michael Bay.

(I hate to quote anyone known as “Movie Bob”, but the Escapist’s movie critic makes an interesting point when he considers this a better action movie than Wolverine, Star Trek and Terminator combined).

We follow one of the later adventures in the life of Carl Frederickson(is it just me, or do they add “son” to the last name of every main character in newer movies for some invisible benefit during the trailers? “Efram Zimbalist Junior…son, was just an ordinary bee-keeper/brain surgeon/gorilla/robot…“). The previous decades are presented to us in a brave display of film-making, animated family-fare or not. It would be criminal to get into details if you haven’t seen it, and if you have, you already know damn well what I’m talking about.

I posit this, however: Frederickson has lived a pretty nice life, all things considered. Even at its darkest. It’s still a shame that it didn’t work out just a little bit better.  A shame too, that Russel’s happy memories of his father are few and far between. It is also unfortunate what happens during a misunderstanding over a mailbox(which also brings what may be the first visible instance of blood in a Pixar movie). These moments of the characters opening themselves, or being opened for us to see were, I felt, where the movie was its brightest. The ads and PR hype downplay Frederickson as a Grumpy Old Man first, who eventually warms up. But right from the start we see him as a bright-eyed star-gazer. It’s more that he’s temporarily chilled, and thawed out in the heat of the Venezuelan rain forest.

I appreciated this film’s honesty, although I’m also glad for when it decided not to latch itself too closely to reality. The entire time, I couldn’t shake the cold hard truth that if an old man with a criminal record on the run came back to civilization with a missing child, and his excuse involved a flying house, pilot-dogs with robot-voice collars and cryptozoology, there would be no happy, scrap-book ending. If Mr. Frederickson and Russel went through all of that in our world, he’d end up on the evening news.

I had fun watching it, even when it was buried knee-deep in clichés(of course there’s going to be a falling out of the main characters right before the big finale). Kids will like the dogs with high-pitched voices, the whimsical rainbow-feathered bird and the high-flying action, but those won’t be the scenes I remember when I’m Frederickson’s age. When Russel talks about his father to Frederickson, he tells him: “For some reason the boring parts are the ones I remember the most.”

Lastly, in the pre-movie animated short “Partly Cloudy”, did anyone else look at the ill-fated stork and think of Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross? Or the down-on-his-luck Simpsons character he inspired, “Gill”?

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~A.H.