Up (2009)
★★★★ — Up (2009)
The first ten minutes of Up will break you. I don't say that lightly, and I don't think it's an exaggeration. What Pixar pull off in that opening montage, a near-wordless portrait of a life shared and then half-removed, is one of the most quietly devastating pieces of filmmaking I've seen in any medium, let alone in something broadly classified as an animated family film. You're sitting there, expecting colour and laughs and talking animals, and instead the film grabs you by the chest and squeezes. Properly squeezes. Then it loosens its grip, picks you up off the floor, and takes you to South America in a house held aloft by a million balloons. And somehow, somehow, it all fits together.
That's the trick Pixar have always been extraordinarily good at, making the impossible feel intimate. I felt it in Monsters, Inc., where a city of monsters became the backdrop for something genuinely tender. Up does something similar, using a flying house and a lost Venezuelan plateau as the setting for a story that's really about grief, loneliness, and what it means to finally let go of the life you planned when the person you planned it with is no longer there. Carl is gruff, stubborn, and thoroughly resistant to charm, which makes him not only believable but genuinely moving. His sorrow isn't performed. It's worn.
The adventure itself is wonderfully inventive. A floating house. Talking dogs with a mechanical voicebox contraption that translates their thoughts. A giant, vivid bird that a young boy has been desperately trying to identify. A villain who turns out to be a fallen hero, which gives the film more moral texture than you might expect. None of it feels like spectacle for its own sake, and that's because the film never loses interest in its characters long enough to get distracted by the set pieces. Even when things go gloriously mad, you're still invested in Carl and Russell and what this journey is doing to both of them.
Dug, the dog, deserves a special mention. Yes, he's funny, properly funny, and his single-minded enthusiasm and total inability to stay on topic lands every time. But he's doing something more than comic relief. He's the film's warmest argument. He loves unconditionally, and he belongs wherever he decides to belong, and the film is quietly making the case that this is exactly the kind of openness Carl has sealed himself off from. Dug isn't just a joke. He's a mirror.
Does it reach the very highest shelf? I'd say it falls just short of Inside Out for me, which I think is Pixar's most completely realised film about the interior life of loss and change. But that's a narrow gap, and it's not a criticism so much as an observation about a studio that keeps setting its own bar at an almost unreasonable height. Up earns every tear it pulls from you and every laugh it gets in between, and it does so without ever feeling manipulative. The emotion comes from character, not from orchestral swells telling you how to feel.
What stays with me most is the idea that adventure doesn't have to mean excitement. Sometimes it means making a choice to still be present in the world when everything in you wants to shut the door and stay inside. Carl's journey is physical and entirely absurd on the surface, and completely sincere underneath. That combination, funny and tender and visually inventive all at once, is exactly what great family filmmaking looks like.
A modern classic. Four stars.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2025-07-23
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Pete Docter: Monsters, Inc. (2001) · Inside Out (2015)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
