I just realized that the Oscars are less than a week away, I thought that they were on the 14th instead of the 7th for some reason so that means I'm going to have to hurry up if I want to post all ten of these before this Sunday. So moving on, I give you number nine:
9. Up (2009).
Pixar's 10th film and there seems to be no end in sight for the company's success. Up has also made a mark for itself in Oscar history being the second animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture, the first is Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), and the first animated feature to accomplish this since the creation of the best animated film category. Perhaps it wouldn't have been nominated without the new 10 best picture nominee format but it's still something to be proud of since Pixar no longer has to be regulated to hanging out at the kid's table of best animated feature each year.
Up is the story of Carl Fredricksen, an elderly man attempting to fill his wife's wishes years after her death. The first twenty-five minutes are clearly the strongest moments of the movie. We get a brief glimpse of the couple's life together, their struggles and their love, and the moments are sweet, tender, and heartbreaking. The way Pixar is able to take decades of the lives of its characters, sum them up wordlessly in a montage lasting only a few minutes, and turn its audience into a bunch of blubbering buffoons clearly shows talent. There really is no other American animation studio able to compete (Calm down Studio Ghibli fans, they're still on the level).
The second half of the film shows its more fantastical elements; houses lifted through the air on thousands of balloons, talking dogs (with fancy collars designed to speak about any language it seems), rare birds, and an antagonist seemingly lost in time and consumed by his own obsessions. One of my favorite aspects of the movie is the image of Carl traveling over the cliffs with his floating house tied to him. The surrealism of the image leaves its mark and impact as the house represents the memory of his wife and his obsession to fulfill her wishes. This is where Carl draws comparison with his childhood hero turned crazed villain, Charles Muntz. Muntz let his obsessed goal drive him mad with desire as he was blind to the lives of those around him and the destruction he caused and Carl may succumb to the same fate. Like the famous quote, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men do nothing." Carl is in danger of ignoring the troubles of those still in his live while still regretting the passing of his wife.
Also, not only is there no other American animation studio on par with Pixar with story telling, you'll be pressed to find a better studio able to produce CG animated films that look as good as the work from Pixar, which is not surprising considering they pioneered the technology. My favorite visual moment of the film is when Carl first lifts his house off the ground. Thousands of balloons pour out of the chimney, the quaint little building creaks and cracks, and tears off the ground and through the air, dazzling the residents of the city. The high point of this scene is the moment it passes by a little girl's window and all the colors of the balloons bounce off the floor, walls, and ceiling of her small room. It's not only a great visual treat but an invocation of that childhood wonder and sense of imagination that I felt as a kid while watching Disney's classic films and am able to revisit with the work of Pixar Studios.
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