Review of Up (2009) by Chads. — 29 May 2009

The burden of dreams. Life happens, and then it happened, and now it's too late. Mourning over his childhood sweetheart, the old man ties himself to the house that is no longer his home. This single-minded obsession to maneuver the cumbersome object through a challenging, rough-hewn landscape somewhat recalls Werner Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo", the 1982 film about a man who moves his own cumbersome object, a steamboat, over an Amazonian mountain.

Instead of head-shrinking natives, Carl(Ed Asner) uses balloons to do the dirty work, which is only fitting since Klaus Kinski often sounded like a loon. As was the filmmaker and his iconic star, the old man is a misanthrope(albeit This antisocial behavior is probably a result from depression).

In one scene, he bloodies a man's forehead with his walker, and in another scene, he initially refuses to grant the boy scout entry into the house despite their rapidly escalating rise in altitude.

During Carl's quest to unburden the burden, they encounter a dog(one of many who seem inspired by Kirsten Bakis' novel "Lives of Monster Dogs") that the old man won't love. These talking canines, in the film's best bit, satirizes the anthropomorphic behavior of animals so prevalent in children's films, by showing how dogs being dogs, revert to the baser instincts that are counterintuitive of their cognition training to evolve into man's best.

..manservant. Carl is also slow to help the bird, a bird that follows the same guiding principles of whimsical zoology as the aquatic creatures found in Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic w/Steve Zissou", whose two main characters played by Bill Murray and William Dafoe, seemed like stand-ins for Herzog and Kinski.

The old man as a boy idolized Charles Muntz(Christopher Plummer), an adventurer. Jacques Cousteau(the inspiration for Anderson's film) was an adventurer too. "Up" is good, but it has the burden of Pixar dreams.

"Up" wakes up.