I have to tell you people a little story. As you know, for my last review, I had to watch Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian. Originally, I was set to go see this with one of my friends, but stuff happened and we had to put off seeing the movie for a week. But, during that time, my friend talked to some people who saw Night at the Museum and decided she didn’t want to see it, so we chose another movie. (Since I had already planned on writing a review on it, I went alone on the weekend.) I just got back from seeing the other movie we chose; UP. It might be the greatest movie that will come out this year!

The story is great. You can tell the writers really worked hard on making a movie that captured the magical whimsy of childhood, but still includes themes that everyone can relate to. The movie starts off with the viewing of another movie, seen through the eyes of a young Carl Frederickson, about the adventurer Charles Muntz‘s exploit to Paradise Falls (in South America). Carl wants to become an adventurer like his idol but is still a bit shy. However, he finds a girl named Ellie in an old abandoned house who seems to help him (possibly unknowingly) come out of his shell. They become quick friends and promise each other that their club house will be on Paradise Falls one day. Eventually they fall in love, get married and move into the club house (which they fix up of course). Life tends to get in the way of their grand plan, but they never seem to lose those childhood dreams. That is, until Ellie dies, leaving Carl alone. This causes Carl to become less adventurous and more introverted, barely leaving his house on some days. One day, while construction is going on all around his house, a mail box that he and Ellie worked on gets damaged. Carl assaults one of the construction workers and has been ordered to be committed to a nursing home. But before they get a chance to take him away, Carl rigs thousands of balloons to his home (beings a former balloon salesman at a zoo) and takes off to both escape going to the nursing home and get his home on Paradise Falls, killing 2 birds with 1 stone. However, when he took off, a boy scout named Russell ended up stranded on his front porch, so Carl is stuck with him in his home. Things go from bad to worse for Carl, since they then fly into sudden storm. Once the storm is lifted, Carl finds he’s at Paradise falls, but not next to the falls like he and Ellie had planned. He ends up having to walk his home to the right place, along with Russell, who both weigh the house down together. And that is just act 1 people! A lot happens in this movie!

The really great thing about this story is the characters. I’ve already explained Carl a bit, but when you see the movie, you really feel him and understand why he does what he does. Russell is also a really interesting character. Despite being a boy scout, he seems to be a little bit spoiled, a momma’s boy and a bit eager to please. We later learned that he comes from a broken family and his step-mother doesn’t let him see his father much. Though this becomes obvious, its not presented in an obvious way, which is what I really liked; kids will say things like “Phyllis doesn’t let me see him much” but coming out front and saying “My mom and dad aren’t together, I hope this will let me see my dad” is unrealistic. (This movie also gets extra points for greatly realistic dialog.) But my favourite character development is the villain: Carl’s hero, Charles Muntz. It seems that years of solitude (other then his army of dogs) and obsession with finding a rare bird has driven him mad. One of the shinning moments of the movie comes when he becomes the antagonist. Carl and Russell find him in Paradise Falls, and he seems normal enough to start; friendly, jovial, like Carl remembered him. Later, the subject of the bird comes up and that’s when his personality changes. Though it seems a bit sudden to us and our heroes, we get, during his speech, that this wasn’t sudden at all, but happened over the years, though once again, he never directly says that. This amazing ability to set up each person’s personality so quickly and perfectly without being obvious once again shows how great a job I think the writers did.

The final point I’m going to make about how well this movie is written (and I guess directed for this part, but they’re the same people) is the emotional aspect of it and, once again, how it’s presented. I know that this movie is advertised as a comedy full of adventure and whimsy, which it is, but it knows how to make you want to cry. I’m going to use two moments to prove my point. The first one is at the start, when we see Carl growing up. Simply in his eyes, his face, his expression, we see the hope of becoming an adventurer. As he lives his life with Ellie, we see how much they care and need each other just by little actions done towards each other. But I think the hardest hitting moment is when Carl buys tickets to fly to South America and plans to give them to Ellie during a picnic, but Ellie can’t run joyfully up the hill like we saw her do before, goes to the hospital, and she dies so close to her dream. The other example is the end of the second act/start of the third one. This might spoil things for some of you, but at that point, Carl actually places his house exactly where it was planned to be, but it all feels so hollow due to everything that had happened before, to both Carl and the audience (we were completely silent during this part). He also finds a book logging Ellie’s adventures since they met. Carl looks at it again only to find that Ellie had placed pictures of their life together before she passed away with a message thanking Carl for the wonderful “adventure” but that its time he made a new one. This gives him a “second wind” of sorts to pursue things he had to ignore in order to get the house in that spot. It’s just a truly emotionally powerful scene. Also, one quick last note, since this is a “family movie” death is never directly seen or talked about, but is always obviously implied, which I think has a emotional bigger impact.

Now let’s talk about graphics. I’ve already expressed that their not the most important thing in previous reviews. The way I see it, they’re like frosting on a cake: even if its butter-cream icing, it won’t make up for a cake made partially of cat poo. In this case, the story would be a deliciously thick chocolate cake, the graphics are a frosting made of real milk chocolate and, if you’re lucky enough to see it in digital 3D, that’s extra chocolate sprinkles (I really like chocolate, can you tell?). The characters are made simple enough: Carl is quite square and his fingers are especially blocky (remind you of anyone’s art style?), Russell is a little bullet shaped and extras in this movie are really oddly formed sometimes. You’d think with how exaggerated some of attributes are that they’d be hard to keep in perspective, but it’s all done quite well. There is also something to be said about some of the small details: my favourite one being that, since this goes on for several days, we see whiskers start to grow on Carl’s face. The digital 3D just adds that little extra touch (hence the chocolate sprinkles) and is also well done, but the movie doesn’t play on it cause it just doesn’t have to. Since this is a digital movie, lighting would also be counted in the graphics, which is always proper for the mood but still realistic for the angle and time of day. All and all, this movie has great graphics to go with a great story.

Now, do you want me to find bad points about this movie? I mean REALLY nitpick? I’ll try. First, there’s the whole idea of balloons used to lift a house. I saw on Mythbusters how much it would take just to lift a little girl, so the amount of balloons it would take to lift a house that size would take more then one night to fill up. It would also be impossible to steer the thing; you’d just be at the mercy of the wind, even with the sails he set up. Another problem: the dogs are too smart. I’m guessing the idea is that Muntz‘s managed to make them that intelligent, but they seem to think and strategize just like humans, with instinct occasionally kicking in for comic effect. SQUIRREL. Dogs don’t have the ability to plan and strategize, they just work on instincts. Other then that, I can’t find anything I didn’t like about the movie, and you eventually end up accepting those things due to just how much fun you’re having. Another sign of just how awesome UP is.

This movie is great; the visuals are great, the audio is great, the story is great, great-great-great-great-GREAT. There are pretty much no flaws in this movie and it just sucks you right in. You’ll defiantly have fun watching it, but you’ll also appreciate the emotional impact it has. It also contains themes like finding the adventure in every day life, moving on after a loss, finding something better then what you’re looking for originally and that it’s the journey, not the destination. We also can’t forget that it’s quite funny. SQUIRREL! UP has reached a certain level of perfection that is normally only reserved for things like Super Mario RPG and certain Bon Jovi songs. My only fear is that it won’t be appreciated when it comes to DVD: this isn’t the type of movie you can just put on and not pay attention, this is the type of movie of movie you have to invite a few friends over, get 3 giant bowls of popcorn and not pay attention to anything else. You might not get that impression from the commercials, but it’s just so hard to accurately portray how good a movie this really is in such a small period of time and still have it look interesting (which is an odd inversion of the case from my last review). Anyways, having already described the movie as being “perfect”, I have to give this movie a 10/10 and recommend- no DEMAND that you see this movie right now! Digital 3D is also strongly recommended. If you have the slightest inner child in you, you’ll find that, during the movie, it will come out and you’ll leave the movie with it on your shoulders shouting “weeeeeeee!”

Now, I’m going to go try to beat the Axem Rangers and listen to Shot Through the Heart while I procrastinate the writing my Spider-man 2 review…