The House That Soared

Finally a bouquet of balloons sends Carl & his house soaring in to the sky, where they go up, up & away & off to an adventure in South The united states with a portly kid, some talking (& snarling & gourmet-cooking) canines & an unexpected villain. Though the initial images of flight are wonderfully rendered — the house shudders & creaks & splinters & 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 & banal story choices, as each new movie becomes another manifestation of the movie-industry divide between art & the bottom line.

In its opening stretch the new Pixar movie “Up” flies high, borne aloft by a sense of creative flight & a flawlessly realized love story. Its on-screen & unlikely escape artist is Carl Fredricksen, a widower & former balloon salesman with a square head & 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, & the years have taken their toll on his lugubrious body & spirit, both of which seem solidly tethered to the ground. Even the five corners of his mouth point straight down. It’s as if they were sagging in to the earth.

In “Up” that divide is evident between the early scenes, which tell Carl’s story with weird tenderness & amazing narrative economy, & 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 & explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Soon 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 wonderfully compresses in to some five wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment & grow happily elderly side by side. Like the opener of “Wall-E” & the critic’s Proustian reminiscence of childhood in “Ratatouille,” this is filmmaking at its purest.

The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter & the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom they 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 quantity of years through a series of images of Kane & 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 basically by rifling through its history.

Those thrills start to peter out after the boy, Russell (Jordan Nagai), inadvertently hitches a ride with Carl, forcing the elderly man to assume increasingly grandfatherly duties. But before that happens there's glories to savor, notably the scenes of Carl — having decided to head off on the kind of adventure Ellie & they 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. lovely is the picture of a small girl jumping in giddy delight as the house rises in front of her massive picture window, the sunlight through the balloons daubing her room with bright color.

In time Carl & Russell, an irritant whose Botero proportions recall those of the human dirigibles in “Wall-E,” float to South The united states where they, the house & the movie come down to earth. Though Mr. Docter’s visual imagination shows no signs of strain here — the picture of Carl obstinately pulling his house, now tethered to his torso, could have come out of the illustrated Freud — the story grows progressively more formulaic. & cuter. Carl comes face to face with his childhood hero, Muntz, an eccentric with the dashing looks & frenetic energy of a younger Kirk Douglas. Muntz lives with a legion of talking canines with which they has been hunting a rare bird whose garish feathers echoes the palette of Carl’s balloons.

The talking canines are certainly a hoot, including the slobbering yellow furball Dug & a squeaky-voiced Doberman, Alpha (both Mr. Peterson), not to mention the dog in the kitchen & the two that pops open the Champagne. & there’s something to be said about the revelation that heroes might not be what you imagined, in a children’s movie & two released by Disney. (Muntz seems partly inspired by Charles Lindbergh at his most courageous & otherwise.) But much like Russell, the small boy with sister problems, & much like Dug, the dog with master issues, the story starts to feel ingratiating to warrant a kick. O.K., O.K., not a kick, some gently expressed regret.