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Nuts To You, Gravity! | Carl Fredricksen travels halfway around the world without ever leaving his home in Pixar’s Up.

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UP
Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson. Featuring the voices of Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, Bob Peterson. Now playing.
****1/2

From the death of Bambi’s mother in 1942 onwards, animated films are notorious for their mistreatment of parents, but the genre has even less time on the whole for the elderly. Maybe it’s because kids more readily identify with young heroes, or maybe because the “circle of life” is code for “old people dying to clear room for the new generation,” but until Carl Fredricksen, the bespectacled old-timer at the heart of Pixar’s Up, never has a cartoon been told from such a resolutely old perspective.

Then again, if you lived Carl’s life, you’d probably spend a lot of time in the past too. Up’s heartbreaking opening sequence takes us on a whirlwind tour of Carl’s younger years, which are almost entirely devoted to Ellie, the love of his life. As kids, the two of them forge an instant bond over their shared love of Charles Muntz, a legendary explorer who ventured into South America in search of a mythical creature and never returned. The young Ellie is a gap-toothed, frizzy-haired spitfire, wrapping the bashful Carl up in her adventures whether he likes it or not. They get married in their 20s, fix up an old house, and blissfully grow old together — the only thing they never quite pull off is a long-planned trip to Muntz’s fabled Paradise Falls. Then Ellie dies, quietly, of old age, and Carl returns home to a house full of shared memories and one empty recliner. At this point, nearly sobbing only five minutes in, I realized I was completely under Pixar’s spell yet again.

When the modern world does poke its head in, Carl (Ed Asner) is being shipped off to a retirement home so his house can be bulldozed and built over. So he takes a page from Ulysses’ playbook and, in search of one last grand adventure, attaches thousands of brightly coloured balloons to his house, rips the whole place out by the foundations, and takes off due south.

And ... that’s about all of the plot I want to give away. One of Up’s most giddy pleasures is how many loopy twists and turns the story takes, starting when Carl discovers the boy scout clinging to his balcony in mid-flight and continuing well past the legion of dogs whose special collars translate their thoughts into English. (Sample: “I hate squirrels.”) The screenplay is credited to just two people, co-directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson — the latter also provides the voice of Dug, the lovable main talking dog — but it whizzes along with the madcap energy of 12 great ideas stitched together.

True to Pixar’s sterling reputation, the film’s animation is gorgeous and wonderfully expressive, and every detail has been lovingly pored over: the way the mass of balloons loses its perky shape as the helium slowly drains out, or how the dogs refer to Russell, the boy scout, as a “little mailman.” Michael Giacchino’s score is nimble and buoyant, and aside from a few obvious jokes about prunes and denture cream, the script never misfires.

This point has been made before, but it’s worth repeating: how incredible is it that as Hollywood hedges more and more of its bets — sequels and remakes galore — there’s a company like Pixar, which is taking bigger and brasher risks as its brand grows? Admittedly, the big trailer preceding Up is a teaser for the ultra-reliable Toy Story 3, which is set to open as a tentpole property next summer, and which is guaranteed to earn Pixar at least a few hundred million dollars. But if anyone can keep a franchise from going stale, it’s got to be these guys.