Best Films of the 2000s: Up (2009) | The Best Films of 2000s: This Guy Over Here

Up (2009)

Starring: Edward Asner (voice), Christopher Plummer (voice)
Director: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson
Country: USA
Genre: Animation, Adventure, Family

2008’s Wall-E was one hell of a film to have to follow in Pixar’s roster. And while Wall-E was incredibly ballsy, not only in its content, but in its storytelling (the first twenty minutes don’t even have any dialogue!,) Up is an equal risk-taker. In no logical world would I have predicted Edward Asner (or an eighty-year-old man like him,) to be an adventure hero, nor in a logical world should he be or should it work, but he is and it does. But it’s this unlikely hero that partly makes Up so damn compelling. This film deals with heavy issues not found in most of Pixar’s other films (or in family films in general!,) particularly with loss and regaining compassion. These are themes you’re not even likely to find in the more mature melodramas, but here it provides such a study structure for an adventure tale that built up an excitement in me that I hadn’t experienced since seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in theaters twenty years ago. Oh, yeah, and it’s hilarious. Did I mention that?

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