Up is Pixar’s most ambitious film yet. It teaches us the truth that Pixar knows well: Life isn’t a series of merit badges or experiences, but of relationships, well cultivated. The best relationships are love stories and this is no exception.
They teach all of this in one short scene – and then expound upon it throughout the film. But the point remains. We are meant to love and be loved and to let the soul go on its adventure of finding its counterpart.
Carl finds Ellie, his soul’s counterpart at a young age and they fall in love. They love the same things – adventure and the adventurer, Charles Muntz – and each other, and so they are married.
Part of being in love is making promises to one another and Carl makes a big one to Ellie. Some of these promises we keep; others we can’t. That doesn’t mean that the promises weren’t true, only that they were unfulfilled. We do it because we want to share a dream. Ellie and Carl dream together. Their decrepit playhouse becomes their dream house which they refurbish with hard work and imagination.
Along the way, they live the good life, even though the greatest adventure – having children – is denied them by biology’s naked unfairness. Instead, they return to the dreams of their childhood, such as going to South America’s Paradise Falls, “A Land Lost in Time.” They save up to go live the adventure but that too is denied them by the everyday little expenses that add up – a broken leg, a wrecked roof, a flat tire. And yet they keep saving, crossing their hearts, and telling one another that one day, they’ll go to Paradise Falls. Of course, life gets in the way. They forget their dreams and by the time Carl realizes it and buys the tickets, it’s too late.
Carl’s disappointed. He hasn’t been able to give the love of his life everything she deserved and now he never will. The film’s tone turns dark, but there might yet be a way to be led back into the light.
Ellie, Carl’s wife, comes from the name Ellen, which in Greek means “torch, bright light.” And what a torch she is, guiding her husband Carl, even in death, to what is true and good. Carl means a “free man.” The question for Carl has he approaches his own death is whether he’s going to roam free after his wife shuffles off her mortal coil.
That’s what Ellie wants for him. “You and me…we’re in a club now,” she tells him and how right she is. Marriage is the ultimate club, and though death may do some part, death doesn’t end it for Carl. Pixar, in its characteristic respect for the holy, has Carl commune with her long after she’s buried.
On her death bed, she pushes her adventure book towards him. She wants him to start his own adventure.
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But he’s not prepared for it and lives out his days in their dream home, coveted by a well-suited developer, who has not, it seems, discovered that he can just take the home via eminent domain. Shady Oaks, a retirement home, looms menacingly in his mind’s eye. That might be a fine place for Carl. After all, oaks don’t bear fruit, they just stand tall and proud until nature wears them down.
That is until Russell enters his life. Russell is, like all kids these days, the product of adult pathologies that retard childhood. (He is also Pixar’s first Asian-American, but you don’t hear the kind of self-congratulatory tone of “diversity, diversity, diversity” that you get from Disney movies.)
Alas, gone are the days when Ellie and Carl could play in an abandoned, dilapidated home. Carl breaks his leg crossing a plank to rescue his balloon. In the real world, that’s a lawsuit. Carl’s parents would have told him to avoid that crazy girl, Ellie, and that would have ended that.
Today’s children are raised in hermetically-sealed, antiseptically-clean, A-C-controlled, self-esteem cradles. In these “homes,” the love of things that are constant – the outdoors, a father’s love, a pet – is denied them by rules. They become, as David Brooks has put it, “achievatrons” that see life just as a series of things to check off a list.
Under the rules, children like Russell aren’t allowed to have dogs in their apartments or hobbies that detract from that college list. No wonder so many seek to go to law school – they want to write those rules! – and no wonder so many are so messed up. These clubs, which, after all, help you get into college and then law school, lack the informality of Carl and Ellie’s club for two. Despite their sleek trophies for all, these accolades don’t minister to the human soul. They are too numerous to have any real worth and excellence without a soul isn’t excellence at all, but mechanics.
One of the credentials that Russell has taken to is being a “Wilderness Explorer”, which is to say an imitation boy scout, and he must get that credential by assisting the elderly, hence “Mr. Frederickson.” After Carl says he doesn’t need help crossing the street, his yard, or his porch, Russell tells him:
Russel: Well, I gotta help you cross something.
Carl: Uh…no I’m doing fine.
He isn’t and it shows, but Carl sends Russell off in pursuit of a snipe, which is to say, he sends him on a wild goose chase. Dutifully, Russell sets off on his new task.
Russell helps Carl cross his heart and keep his promise to Ellie of journeying to Paradise Falls with the flying house.
Alas, Russell has his flaws. His wilderness exploring is not Calvin Coolidge’s cub scouts. (If you haven’t read his speech on the cub scouts, you must.) He has never slept outside, nor been camping. He lousily constructs a tent that is flicked off into the great beyond. It is not the shelter from the storm. His mode of navigation is the GPS, not the maps, but that GPS is promptly lost.
This is, of course, deliberate on Pixar’s part. It’s much more important to know where we are going than where we are. “The Wilderness,” as Russell’s notes, “has got to be explored,” but the wildest parts of us are explored only through relationships teasing out what is of meaning. We seek out the flora and fauna of the forbidden jungles only because we want to share them with others.
After all, that’s what Ellie and Carl’s hero, Charles Muntz did. He journeyed to the greatest stretches of the earth, bringing back the specimens that engaged minds and imaginations of children like Carl and Ellie, who sought to have their own magnificent adventures. In a way, this was a different kind of credentialing – one that sought to show the possible forms that existed in nature.
But, then, suddenly, he was out of the public’s good graces when a bird he captured was thought to be a fraud. Kill a man if you will, but challenge his credentials, thou shalt not. In a huff, he self-exiled himself to Paradise Falls in search of the beast that had dashed his reputation. Since then, Muntz lived high in his blimp and high off his ambition, aided by his talking dogs, who with the aid of technology, spoke to him, but they did not minister to his longing for human attention and admiration. In short order, he was driven mad. The beast still eluded him when Carl and Russell arrived at last to deposit the flying house to its resting spot.
The beast happens to be Russell’s new friend, Kevin, and Carl’s description of the snipe Russell was supposed to find. To protect Kevin from being taken from her babies – you read that right – Russell and Carl must battle Carl’s childhood hero, Charles Muntz who is set on adding the specimen to his collection.
Along the way, there’s flying houses, flying dogs in WWI style planes, flying blimps, flying snipes. It’s up, up, and away. The sky – and the imagination – is at limitless as Carl’s dedication to Ellie’s dream. It’s an adventure up in the clouds.
It does all that – and more, but all of it seems secondary to what’s going on beneath the surface. You see it in the moments of levity between Carl and Russell. Off to save Russell and Kevin from Muntz, Carl throws out all of his possession. He doesn’t need any of it but he does need his friends. He runs off to save them.
Critics dismissed this heroism of the geezer. He starts off in a walker and ends up in a blimp, journeying the world. But age, is to a certain extent, a choice. We’re all dying all the time, but it’s how we live that sets us apart. And there are all kinds of heroism in everyday life.
At the end of the film, he pins the pin that Ellie gave him long ago, the pin that made him a part of their club, and he gives it to Russell. (Russell’s father, despite his promise to be there at the ceremony, isn’t there at all.) “I would like to award you the highest honor I can bestow – the Ellie badge.” Carl shed nearly everything he had to remember Ellie, but remembers what he found in her adventure book. “Thanks for the adventure, now go have a new one.”
She’s alive in his mind and his heart and that’s enough.
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