Word: docter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Those, you might say, were the compass points of last summer's Pixar wonder WALL-E, of which Docter was the original director (before handing the project to Andrew Stanton). There are other similarities between that futurist galactic epic and Up, which arrives in North American theaters Friday after its rapturous reception two weeks ago as the opening-night attraction at the Cannes Film Festival. Both movies are about lonely creatures - a droid left on Earth, a man whose cherished wife has died - taking a perilous trip. Both protagonists are stout and box-shaped and don't talk much. Both...
...home, Carl finds a kindred spirit: a girl named Ellie (voiced by Docter's young daughter Elie), as vivacious as he is stolid, who harbors the same dream of visiting Paradise Falls. It's love at first sight, and in a tender montage, Up shows us their life together: the wedding, the fixing up of their home, the quiet walks, their respective jobs at the local zoo (she tending the animals, he selling balloons), their eager preparations for a child they later learn they can't have, their need to defer the big trip to pay for home improvements, then...
...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...
...Echoes of Oz The movie stirs lots of cinematic echoes, some natural - Walt Disney's Dumbo was a touchstone for Docter - and some weird. The dragging of a large structure over rugged South American terrain is also a motif in the Werner Herzog epic Fitzcarraldo. A love story continued after death: Remember Ghost? Docter also cites Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent, "the story of a solitary guy who reconnects with the world...
...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. His wife is more curves, almost balloon shapes, and Russell is very balloon-like." From his shape, Russell...