Watching "Up" Brought Me Down

Well, I finally got around to buying a DVD of the Disney movie “up.” It certainly wasn't what I was expecting. In fact, I guess you could say there's something to depress every age group and this film. The movie starts off well enough, with the story of a boy and a girl he meets who both share a sense of adventure. At this stage of the movie, things are pretty optimistic. It seems as though we've entered the beginning of some magical adventure which may lead our two main characters to some lost faraway exotic location in search of their childhood hero. That hero is an explorer who travels to deepest darkest South America in a magnificent dirigible seeking to find the rarest of all creatures.

Very quickly, we begin to discover that things aren’t going to go as expected. Time passes and our protagonists begin to age very quickly. Before we know it, the story that we expected seems as though it can never occur because the two main characters become senior citizens in the first 10 minutes of the movie. As if that wasn't bad enough, every time it seems as though they might have had a chance for adventure they have to raid the piggy bank for funds and never seem to have the money to realize their dream. Then of course one of the two protagonists now a wife an old woman, dies. Once she's gone, we realize the idyllic home and environment that they had been living in is now surrounded by an urban jungle. Evil developers wearing ‘men in black’ shades are trying to tear down the home where there was at least some happiness if not any adventure.



10 foot tall Blue Birds and Talking Dogs couldn't save this movie

The main character in the movie is portrayed by Ed Asner, who must be at least as old as the character he was playing on film. At this stage in his life, the main character has lost his wife, had zero adventures and has become a bit of a curmudgeon. Ed Asner has always been adept at playing curmudgeons, even when he wasn't very old. Once I realized who the actor was supplying the voice for the animated character, I couldn't get the image out of my mind of the character he played in “JFK.” I was expecting the animated old curmudgeon to start drinking and talking about Operation Mongoose and then pistol whip the other characters. I think that would have been more interesting than the plot line that was actually followed.

Without giving too much away, the curmudgeon and a stowaway Boy Scout escape the urban jungle utilizing homegrown dirigible technology (shades of Balloon Boy) and head to that faraway fantasy adventure land known as Venezuela. The animators apparently spent an incredible amount of time and effort to accurately recreate the environment in Venezuela where the actual adventure finally takes place. It all centers around a place called Angel falls. And of course I know all about it now because I watched the special feature that came with the DVD showing how all the animators and filmmakers trekked around the jungles near Angel falls so that they could become inspired by the natural landscape and incorporate that realism into their animations. The one thought that kept going through my head though while I was watching that, was that once they had visited the place they would likely be a few of the only several hundred people on the planet who actually knew what the place looked like. So it begs the question, why the big focus on accuracy in depicting Angel falls, and why the relative lack of focus on the plot line?

As an animation production, the film is technically very rich and generally pleasant to watch. However the hallmark of many recent Disney and Pixar films has not been the excellent animation per se, it's been the ever-improving storylines associated with animated movies. Aspects of this movie's plot seemed disjointed, hard to follow and not particularly appealing. The plot line revolving the movie's villain who at one point was the movie's hero is particularly confusing and disappointing. Populating the movie with talking dogs didn't seem to further the plot line any and made me wonder whether or not somebody had pitched this as pandering recognition to an audience primarily populated by children who might find talking dogs cool.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend this DVD. The conclusion of the movie wasn't particularly satisfying and for all you women out there the only real female character got killed off in the first 15 minutes, so no matter what happened afterwards the movie remains depressing from that perspective. The one thing I'm inspired to do after watching this film is to make sure I go out and live my life a little more before all the people I love are dead and I'm an invalid.


Copyright 2009, Raving Reviews™ .