Pixar’s latest animated movie, Up, is pretty good. Most Pixar movies focus on relationships that do not have a nuclear family dynamic. The Incredibles was an exception.
The protagonist is a man who is waiting to die. He has lived his life and now there is nothing left. He is old, he feels broken. His life with his late wife is told quickly and it brought a tear to my eye. Okay, many tears. To escape the loss of his house and his freedom, he floats it away with a lot of balloons. Adventure ensues.
I saw the movie in 3D, and this is great 3D. Because it is animated, it is possible to render depth of field. I popped my glasses down to look at the screen several times and things that were in long focus were still clear. Things in the foreground, like a character’s hair, were slightly blurry, but the leaped off the screen when I put the glasses back on. With other 3D technologies, the reflection off the front of viewers glasses in back of me would be reflected off the inside of my glasses and be quite annoying. This was due to lens coatings, I think. This would show up when there was a lot of light on the screen as white blinking lights just at the edge of my peripheral vision. I didn’t like it. I didn’t see any of that in this screening.
Apart from the technology, the storytelling was quite good. Pixar movies usually have a message or two that can be extracted, along with small character things that stick. In A Bug’s Life, the characters Tuck and Roll are easy to remember, even though they had no dialog. The parable of the rock stuck with Bookzilla. She went around saying “Voila, it’s a tree!”, even though she was around three. In Finding Nemo, the turtles who said little more than “Dude!” bring a smile, but Nemo’s discovery of “Keep swimming!” is a message to remember at all ages. In Up, the dogs cracked me up, but the message of what makes an adventure is the lasting one.
This movie should be seen in the theater in 3D.