3D lends Up’s imagery an entrancing vibrancy, providing even more visual depth to Pixar’s literally and figuratively deepest offering yet, a masterful tale of longing, regret, dreams and happiness wrapped up in a colorful, rollicking adventure-yarn package. Channeling Werner Herzog (specifically, The White Diamond) as well as his own prior, superlative Monsters, Inc., director Pete Docter’s film has a lightness befitting its central object – a house floating from urban development hell to South America via a bounty of brightly hued balloons – and a profundity at once subtle and piercing. Docter captures the exhilaration of exploration, the wonder of cinema and the thrill of young love in an immaculately realized opening, as young Carl Fredricksen, decked out in an aerial cap and goggles, stares in awe at newsreel footage of his adventurer hero Charles Muntz, and then during an imaginative stroll discovers a kindred spirit – and lifelong partner – in Ellie, whom the subsequent decades-spanning silent-film montage reveals as his beloved wife. It’s a wordless sequence that rivals any put to film this year (or in last year’s WALL-E), conveying an aesthetic nimbleness and richness of mature feeling – of the joy and pain of adulthood, specifically regarding the way life can unpredictably rebuff, and force us to reconfigure, our aspirations for the future – that’s simultaneously elating and heartbreaking.
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