In its opening stretch the new Pixar movie “Up” flies high, borne aloft by a sense of creative flight and a flawlessly realized love story. Its on-screen and unlikely escape artist is Carl Fredricksen, a widower and former balloon salesman with a square head and a round nose that looks ready for honking. Voiced with appreciable impatience by Ed Asner, Carl isn’t your typical American animated hero. He’s 78, for starters, and the years have taken their toll on his lugubrious body and spirit, both of which seem solidly tethered to the ground. Even the two corners of his mouth point straight down. It’s as if he were sagging into the earth.
Eventually a bouquet of balloons sends Carl and his house soaring into the sky, where they go up, up and away and off to an adventure in South America with a portly child, some talking (and snarling and gourmet-cooking) dogs and an unexpected villain. Though the initial images of flight are wonderfully rendered — the house shudders and creaks and splinters and groans as it’s ripped from its foundation by the balloons — the movie remains bound by convention, despite even its modest 3-D depth. This has become the Pixar way. Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art and the bottom line.
In “Up” that divide is evident between the early scenes, which tell Carl’s story with extraordinary tenderness and brilliant narrative economy, and the later scenes of him as a geriatric action hero. The movie opens with the young Carl enthusing over black-and-white newsreel images of his hero, a world-famous aviator and explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Shortly thereafter, Carl meets Ellie, a plucky, would-be adventurer who, a few edits later, becomes his beloved wife, an adult relationship that the director Pete Docter brilliantly compresses into some four wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment and grow happily old side by side. Like the opener of “Wall-E” and the critic’s Proustian reminiscence of childhood in “Ratatouille,” this is filmmaking at its purest.
The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter and the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are looking back to the silent era, as Andrew Stanton did with the Chaplinesque start to “Wall-E.” Even so, partly because “Up” includes a newsreel interlude, its marriage sequence also brings to mind the breakfast table in “Citizen Kane.” In this justly famous (talking) montage, Orson Welles shows the collapse of a marriage over a number of years through a series of images of Kane and his first wife seated across from each other at breakfast, another portrait of a marriage in miniature. As in their finest work, the Pixar filmmakers have created thrilling cinema simply by rifling through its history.
Those thrills begin to peter out after the boy, Russell (Jordan Nagai), inadvertently hitches a ride with Carl, forcing the old man to assume increasingly grandfatherly duties. But before that happens there are glories to savor, notably the scenes of Carl — having decided to head off on the kind of adventure Ellie and he always postponed — taking to the air. When the multihued balloons burst through the top of his wooden house it’s as if a thousand gloriously unfettered thoughts had bloomed above his similarly squared head. Especially lovely is the image of a little girl jumping in giddy delight as the house rises in front of her large picture window, the sunlight through the balloons daubing her room with bright color.
In time Carl and Russell, an irritant whose Botero proportions recall those of the human dirigibles in “Wall-E,” float to South America where they, the house and the movie come down to earth. Though Mr. Docter’s visual imagination shows no signs of strain here — the image of Carl stubbornly pulling his house, now tethered to his torso, could have come out of the illustrated Freud — the story grows progressively more formulaic. And cuter. Carl comes face to face with his childhood hero, Muntz, an eccentric with the dashing looks and frenetic energy of a younger Kirk Douglas. Muntz lives with a legion of talking dogs with which he has been hunting a rare bird whose gaudy plumage echoes the palette of Carl’s balloons.
The talking dogs are certainly a hoot, including the slobbering yellow furball Dug and a squeaky-voiced Doberman, Alpha (both Mr. Peterson), not to mention the dog in the kitchen and the one that pops open the Champagne. And there’s something to be said about the revelation that heroes might not be what you imagined, particularly in a children’s movie and particularly one released by Disney. (Muntz seems partly inspired by Charles Lindbergh at his most heroic and otherwise.) But much like Russell, the little boy with father problems, and much like Dug, the dog with master issues, the story starts to feel ingratiating enough to warrant a kick. O.K., O.K., not a kick, just some gently expressed regret.
飞屋环游记的英文观后感3
Given the inherent three-dimensional quality evident in Pixar's cutting-edge output, the fact that the studio's 10th animated film is the first to be presented in digital 3-D wouldn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking in and of itself.
But what gives "Up" such a joyously buoyant lift is the refreshingly nongimmicky way in which the process has been incorporated into the big picture -- and what a wonderful big picture it is.
Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.
It's also the ideal choice to serve as the first animated feature ever to open the Festival de Cannes, considering the way it also pays fond homage to cinema's past, touching upon the works of Chaplin and Hitchcock, not to mention aspects of "It's a Wonderful Life" "The Wizard of Oz" and, more recently, "About Schmidt."
Boxoffice-wise, the sky's the limit for "Up."
Even with its PG rating (the first non-G-rated Pixar picture since "The Incredibles"), there really is no demographic that won't respond to its many charms.
The Chaplin-esque influence is certainly felt in the stirring prelude, tracing the formative years of the film's 78-year-old protagonist, recent widower Carl Fredricksen (terrifically voiced by Ed Asner).
Borrowing "WALL-E's" poetic, economy of dialogue and backed by composer Michael Giacchino's plaintive score, the nostalgic waltz between Carl and the love of his life, Ellie, effectively lays all the groundwork for the fun stuff to follow.
Deciding it's better late than never, the retired balloon salesman depletes his entire inventory and takes to the skies (house included), determined to finally follow the path taken by his childhood hero, discredited world adventurer Charles F. Muntz (Christopher Plummer).
But he soon discovers there's a stowaway hiding in his South America-bound home in the form of Russell, a persistent eight-year-old boy scout (scene-stealing young newcomer Jordan Nagai), and the pair prove to be one irresistible odd couple.
Despite the innate sentimentality, director Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") and co- director-writer Bob Peterson keep the laughs coming at an agreeably ticklish pace.
Between that Carl/Russell dynamic and Muntz's pack of hunting dogs equipped with multilingual thought translation collars, "Up" ups the Pixar comedy ante considerably.
Meanwhile, those attending theaters equipped with the Disney Digital 3-D technology will have the added bonus of experiencing a three-dimensional process that is less concerned with the usual "comin' at ya" razzle-dazzle than it is with creating exquisitely detailed textures and appropriately expansive depths of field.
There’s nothing better than an easy review: Pixar’s latest summer offering, UP, is a fantastic film. Simply fantastic. Seriously, if Ratatouille and Wall-E deserved to be in the running for Best Picture of the Year (as many said they did at the times of their releases) then UP certainly does.
It’s that good.