Up

[Surlyboi]

To quote a friend of mine, Pixar will punch you in the gut and make you cry like a baby in the first 15 minutes and then make you laugh your ass off for most of the rest.

That said, I saw it in a theater where a couple brought their one-year-olds in as an excuse to see the movie and I was ready to punch both parents and children after about five minutes.

[Nebu]

Punch the parents.  The baby is doing what it was designed to do.

So... how was the movie other than funny?  I love pixar flicks. 

Scale of 1-10, what did you think?  Perhaps relate it to other pixar films. 

[Tarami]

I only got one question!

Is it better than The Incredibles?

[Polysorbate80]

I only got one question!

Is it better than The Incredibles?

I got one more:

Why the fuck can't they release Incredibles on blu-ray already??

[Brogarn]

Comparing the Incredibles to Up is like comparing The Notebook to Ironman. Just not the same genre. They're both animated and that's where the similarities end.

This movie broke my heart, uplifted my spirit and made me its crying bitch. Awesome flick.

[Surlyboi]

Comparing the Incredibles to Up is like comparing The Notebook to Ironman. Just not the same genre. They're both animated and that's where the similarities end.

This movie broke my heart, uplifted my spirit and made me its crying bitch. Awesome flick.

That pretty much sums it up.

[Tarami]

It was a purposefully obtuse question to be frank. What was supposed to be read between the lines was, "The Incredibles is yet their best film and here's to hoping Up is on par or even better." Having seen the trailer, I didn't really expect them to be comparable.

For good measure, I will add that I didn't find Cars, Ratatouille nor Wall-E very good. They were too tired as stories, in my opinion, too.... childish? Emotionally rather simple and linear, so to speak. The Incredibles' major theme was rejection and comparatively it has much more depth and complexities than for example loneliness, as in Wall-E's case. Cars was just too close to a rehash of Toy Story. Ratatouille blurred the line between rats and humans too much, to a point where they were largely interchangeable except for shape. Being accepted as a rat was one stretch too many.

[SurfD]

They really need to make a new category for the Academy Awards:  Pixar Movie.

This way, the other movies in the ""Best Animated Feature" category will at least have a chance of winning something.

[Trippy]

Pixar doesn't always win Best Animated Film.

[Abagadro]

It's 4/6 when it has a film nominated which is a pretty good batting average.

[Trippy]

How Monsters, Inc. (still my favorite of the Pixar movies) lost to Shrek I'll never understand.

[schild]

How Monsters, Inc. (still my favorite of the Pixar movies) lost to Shrek I'll never understand.

Titanic beat As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, and L.A. Confidential for Best Movie.

In a world like that, why would you even want to understand?

[Ironwood]

Also, Shawshank was robbed.

[SurfD]

Jonny Depp loses Best Actor to Sean Penn.  I SOOO wanted to reach through the aether and stab me some Academy Voters.

[schild]

Also, Shawshank was robbed.

I could've coped with Forrest Gump beating the other 1997 nominees. At least I could've understood "why." Titanic was a $600M parade of no-talent ass-clowns with the most memorable scene being what is possible the corniest scene in the history of cinema. It's arguably DiCaprio's worst performance to date and Winslet was laughably bad. It got no awards associated with qualities anyone gives a shit about in movies (you know, acting and writing, that stuff). It's the blackest of black marks on the history of cinema.

At least Shawshank Redemption has gone down as "one of the best movies ever made, anywhere, in the past, future, and forever." Or at least, I think that's the title they've given to it now whereas Good Will Hunting got relegated to censored reruns on USA and TBS for the following decade and most people forgot how goddamn amazing LA Confidential was.

Maybe that's what happened, they couldn't pick whether to give it to Good Will Hunting or LA Confidential so they gave it to the movie that would make a bunch of teenage girls wet. /anger

Fake Edit: SurfD, I was more pissed he beat Bill Murray. Johnny Depp is always amazing and has been playing some form of that character since, well, since forever. Part of the reason I'm so stoked for Public Enemies as it will be the first time since Chocolat he's playing someone halfway to normal (in the big scheme of things). I don't count Finding Neverland or Secret Window because he phoned that shit in. Small paycheck I guess, or just bad writing. Of course, I can't wait for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus though I'm pissed there's no release date for America but there is for Italy. Also, it's the last movie we'll get to see Heath Ledger in, but thank god he finally managed to get into one with Depp. :swoon:

Edit:In looking for a release date, I couldn't help click the trivia button:

After the death of Heath Ledger, production was shut down for a few months. Then it was re-started when Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell agreed to complete Ledger's role. The film's fantasy premise, and some clever rewrites, let the actors play a man whose appearance changes as he travels between imaginary worlds.

This may end up the best movie evar. EVAR.

Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law gave all the income they received for this movie to Heath Ledger's daughter Matilda so that her economic future would be secure.

:double_swoon:

France      22 May 2009      (Cannes Film Festival)
Italy    4 September 2009    
Romania    18 September 2009    
Netherlands    24 September 2009    
Czech Republic    1 October 2009    
New Zealand    29 October 2009    
Belgium    11 November 2009    
France    11 November 2009    
Germany    3 December 2009

What a god damn joke.

[Kitsune]

I made it through Schindler's List with nothing more than being bummed out, but Up managed to get me misty-eyed in a couple scenes.  Bravo for managing to strike such empathic chords with animated characters.  Lots of great moments, no disappointments.

[pxib]

It was the music. Manipulative orchestration can wring tears out of anyone.

The first fifteen minutes (and their bookend near the film's climax) were absolutely brilliant. As a short film they would have been totally stunning and easily won any competition it entered. The rest of the film only lives up to that potential in a few moments. If the movie had only had the Carl, the dogs, and the jungle creature I would have had no complaints. The boy and the master nearly ruined the film for me by dragging it bodily across the rocks and back towards conventional Disney fare.

So no, it wasn't as complete as the Incredibles, but Pixar makes beautiful and detailed little masterpieces. This is undeniably one, flawed though it is.

EDIT: Good a place to put this as any... speaking of Oscar winning animated shorts that use music to make me cry, here's a little Dutch gem from 2000: Father and Daughter

[Mattemeo]

Gotta wait till the 16th of October for Up to get its UK release. This shit is becoming unforgivable in this day and age - there is no earthly reason we have to wait nearly half a year to see a movie which needs absolutely no localisation for another English speaking country.

The Incredibles remains my benchmark of CG Animated movies - and I loved Ratatouille and WALL-E. Artistically, technically speaking, they're superior movies in terms of rendering and animation, but The Incredibles is a sucker-punch of brilliant characterisation, storytelling and animation that revells in the fantastic and stylized action but captivates utterly in the minituia of family life. The scene where Elastigirl comforts Violet outside the cave after Violet's failure to protect the plane? If it were a live action flick, you'd be thinking 'that's some damn good acting'. Because it's animation, it doesn't even register as acting, it's a mother consoling her daughter and as emotionally real as that gets.

I have high hopes for Up, because it's a very non-standard bit of storytelling with a daring main character - far more daring that an appealing robot or a gifted rodent - grandad. I read the treatment for it a couple of years ago and together with Newt, coming 2011, I've been certain Pixar aren't going to drop the ball any time soon.

That said, Up is going to need to be really good to compete with Coraline this year.

[UnSub]

The most impressive thing about "The Incredibles" is that it has a female superhero in it who is awesome. Stop. Think about all the female superheroes you see in films. They pretty much all range from complete suckage (porn superhero genre films excepted, because they are meant to suck) to maybe passable. Elastigirl was awesome. Her saving her kids from the exploding plane was a fantastic scene.

"Wall-E" was also fantastic for turning what is mostly non-vocal characters into such expressive creations. Some of it is a little ham-fisted, but Wall-E and Eve are both very well done.

I'll probably see "Up".

[SurfD]

Minor spoiler also, but this is the first time i can remember EVER seeing blood in a disney related animated film.   Sure, often blood or fatal wounds are "implied" when the villian dies (think Ursula getting stabbed by a ship and whatnot) but i cant recall them ever showing so much as a bleeding scrape in any previous disney movie.

And no, to clarify, no one gets horribly wounded or such in UP, but there was still blood.

[naum]

Caught it last night in 3D.

Good flick, wasn't exactly "up" to awesomeness ascribed to it by Rotten Tomatoes reviews, but it was entertaining nevertheless, and the 3D was well worth the extra $2 (though it seemed only the previews and early parts of the film really exploited it, or it could be that my eyes became attuned to the 3D effect).

Mrs. Naum loved it.

I liked Wall-E better though.

[pxib]

Minor spoiler also, but this is the first time i can remember EVER seeing blood in a disney related animated film.   Sure, often blood or fatal wounds are "implied" when the villian dies (think Ursula getting stabbed by a ship and whatnot) but i cant recall them ever showing so much as a bleeding scrape in any previous disney movie.

There's quite a bit of blood in that breaker of several Disney taboos, The Black Cauldron, one of the (many) reasons it's their only animation rated PG. Dori gets a bloody nose in Finding Nemo, and there are plenty of red line scrapes in dramatic moments throughout Disney's last several films.

[Khaldun]

Even when the film turns conventional, it has so much authentic heart, genuine characterization and extremely clever visualizations--the various shapes and poses of Kevin the Bird, for example--that it's in a league very nearly of its own. The gap between Pixar and Dreamworks is so wide that it makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk. I really don't know if there's a studio in cinematic history with this kind of consistency--Pixar's only genuinely weak work in my opinion would be Cars and A Bug's Life--and A Bug's Life is strongly superior to everything but the very best Dreamworks output.

[Quinton]

Saw Up tonight with a bunch of friends.  Fantastic film.  I do need to catch up on the other more recent Pixar stuff (I had no interest in Cars, but meant to watch Wall-E and haven't gotten around to it).  I should also rewatch some of their older stuff -- the Incredibles remains my favorite I think, but Up is right next to it now.

[Kitsune]

Dreamworks did good things with Shrek and Kung-Fu Panda.  They aren't eternal monuments to the craft of animated drama, but they're good entertainment.  Comparing them against Pixar's work is nearly an apples and oranges scenario, even though they both use the same media.  Pixar makes computer art that happens to be a movie.  Dreamworks makes movies that happen to be computer-animated.  The lines cross in a few spots, but by and large they're very distant.

And I will totally cut a motherfucker if they don't release Incredibles on blu-ray soon.  That movie deserves the HD release, being my favorite Pixar flick, hands-down.

[shiznitz]

I took the entire family (kids 7, 5, 3) to the movies for the first time for Up. Everyone enjoyed it. I thought it was good, not great. I liked Wall-E better.  The dog collar idea was brilliant, though.

[Jimbo]

Great movie!  Took my girlfriend and our kids (17, 13, & 10) to see it, if you don't cry and laugh you aren't human.

[Nebu]

Saw this today with my daughter.  Both of us enjoyed it.  I still can't believe how moving it was. 

[Prospero]

I finally saw this before it slipped from the theaters. Definitely up there with Incredibles, Wall-E, and the Toy Stories. I'm still amazed by the emotional range they manage to fit into their movies. The visuals were also impressive. Doug's fur in some of the later scenes was damn close to perfect. The other dogs were a bit off I thought, but otherwise killer work from the tech teams.