‘Up’ and the Spirit of Adventure

After keeping tabs on the hype for the last couple of months, I finally made it to “Up” last night. The latest from Pixar, which tells the story of an old man finally living out his South American travel dreams, has been pleasing critics and owning the box office, so I was keen to get to the theater myself.

And the verdict? Well, a little bit mixed.

“Up” has Pixar’s trademark cocktail of top-notch animation, clever scripting that deftly mixes humor with heartstring-tugging, and a couple of goofy sidekicks for good measure. Still—and maybe the huge expectations that surrounded the film are partly to blame, here—I felt like something was missing. The story’s various arcs didn’t cohere into a clear whole the way that, say, “Finding Nemo” did. I enjoyed the movie, but I don’t know if its characters, its jokes and its finest animation sequences will really stay with me.

What will stay with me? The exciting sense of adventures-waiting-to-be-seized that infuses the movie, and its bittersweet accompaniment: the fear that we will wait too long to seize them, and then live with our regrets. The elderly Karl, a curmudgeonly widower and retired balloon salesman, is as unlikely an animated protagonist as I’ve ever seen, but I suspect that when I’ve forgotten all about the movie’s talking dogs, its (admittedly hilarious) geriatric fight sequences, or its visual take on the wilds of Venezuela, it’s his melancholic determination to turn things around that I’ll remember most.

Cheery? Not entirely. But worth seeing? For fans of old-fashioned, fantastical adventure, absolutely.

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