The Sacramento Bee, Calif., Carla Meyer column: Movie Review: Up, up and away!

Fri. May 29, 2009; Posted: 06:00 AM

With "Ratatouille," "WALL-E" and now "Up," Pixar Animation Studios has graduated from moviedom's finest animation house to its most consistent producer of great cinematic art, period.

Who else could make a 3-D movie this profound? "Up," Pixar's first full length picture shot in 3-D (and projected in 3-D in select local theaters), uses the process to enhance the visual and emotional depth of the story of Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), a balloon salesman who transports kit, caboodle and stowaway kid to South America via the wonders of helium.

Carl's house-turned-airship carries with it a storied history, as "Up" shows us during its immensely moving opening sequence. It is in this house that Carl, as a boy, first meets Ellie, a spirited redhead as captivated as he by newsreel footage of a famous zeppelin pilot's exploits in South America.

Carl and Ellie grow up, marry each other and turn the abandoned house where they played as kids into a lovely home, with their ensuing life together presented in a nearly wordless visual shorthand style that exhibits both a sense of storytelling economy and great empathy.

If there are dry eyes left in the theater after this sequence, they will not belong to adults but rather to children who don't understand the implications of its imagery. Like "Ratatouille" and "WALL-E," "Up" carries a height requirement for full understanding of its concepts; and this aspect of the picture, when coupled with action scenes that are harder-edged than any in "Ratatouille" or "WALL-E," marks this as Pixar's most mature outing to date.

It's no coincidence that "Up" features more human characters than most Pixar films. As much as one feels for a rat that wants to be a chef or a robot in love with another robot, seeing a 78-year-old man deflated by the death of his beloved wife pulls much harder at the heartstrings.

Carl's face, squeezed into what seems like a permanently grumpy expression, will become a canvas for all sorts of emotions as "Up" unfolds, some of them achieved with help from Asner, who perfected the brusque-softie delivery decades ago on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and others the result of pure Pixar magic.

Russell (a peppy Jordan Nagai ), the highly decorated 8-year-old Junior Wilderness Explorer who first knocks on Carl's door looking to earn a badge for "assisting the elderly," is fashioned more broadly. But his amorphous physical qualities work in context, since the boy's sense of self is not yet formed. His enthusiasm, though, is always clear -- so clear it can aggravate Carl.

Already fighting developers who bought up all the land around his house, the cranky Carl blows off Russell by sending him on a wild goose chase. Because that hunt led the boy beneath Carl's house, Russell takes flight along with the rest of the place when Carl attaches thousands of balloons and heads south, toward the mesa where Ellie always dreamed of living.

Scenes of house floating through sky are rendered with breathtaking clarity. But the adventure really starts once Carl and Russell hit South America. There they encounter all sorts of life -- plant, animal, megalomaniacally human -- and the audience experiences visuals so layered they seem to momentarily allow the eye to exceed its natural physical capabilities.

Director Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") always uses the 3-D effect for good, never for gimmickry, seemingly aware at all times that the story (written by Docter, co-director Bob Peterson and Tom McCarthy -- the filmmaker behind the excellent "The Visitor") rests on pillars of compassion and respect. Such compassion and respect, "Up" tells us, should be extended to cranky grandpa figures in need of adventure, upbeat 8-year-olds in need of grandpa figures and, most important, to small moments in our everyday lives, no matter how inconsequential they might seem.

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