Word: carl
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Since this character study is also an action-adventure film, Carl has to go somewhere - Paradise Falls, obviously. But he doesn't have to leave his home. Threatened with eviction to an old folks' home, he attaches 20,000 helium-filled balloons to his house, and off it floats toward South America. But there's a stowaway on board: Russell (Jordan Nagai), a plump, determined kid who has been pestering Carl to let him "assist the elderly," the one good deed he needs to become a full Wilderness Explorer. The old man isn't pleased, but he's not stopping...
...Docter notes, Up is driven by the idea of escape - the notion, familiar to dreamers of any age, that "you could just float away and take what you want with you." What Carl wants to take is the house where he spent a happy half-century with Ellie and where, in a sense, she still lives. Like a snail or, more likely, Atlas, Carl carries his house and the world's burden on his back; his wish for escape is also a sacred responsibility, to take Ellie to Paradise Falls. Thanks to some extraordinarily favorable trade winds, that's where...
...contrast to the muted palette of Carl's home, the South American landscape is a genial riot of color that looks ravishing in whatever format the movie is shown in. Up will be projected in 3-D in many theaters, but there are no special boinggg effects, and you needn't pay the extra $3 to get the emotional or visual lift the picture delivers. In his Variety review, Todd McCarthy wrote that "the film's overall loveliness presents a conceivable argument in favor of seeing it in 2-D: Even with the strongest possible projector bulbs...
...vision of a superhero family, Up is the first Pixar feature in which the main characters are humans. Up isn't realistic either. It revels in a minimum of dialogue, deft comic underplaying and a style the Pixar people call simplexity, a character design that stresses circles and cubes. (Carl looks like a trash-compacted Spencer Tracy in his later years.) "We tried to push caricature," Docter says, "and the language of shapes - to make these drawings an expression of the characters. Carl wants to stay enclosed in his box of a house. He's just kind of square...
...Every Pixar production involves some 300 artists, but the actors come first; they have to, because the dialogue is recorded to guide the animators. Asner, 79, who used his slow burn brilliantly on the great Mary Tyler Moore '70s sitcom, had the gruffness and deadpan comic timing to bring Carl to vocal life. As Docter recalls, "When we first met Ed and showed him a small sculpture we'd made of Carl, he said [growling], 'I don't look anything like that.' And we thought, O.K., this is gonna be perfect." Docter and Peterson then tailored the dialogue...