By [This week is Pixar Week here at Flixist, so we’re doing special reviews and features for all things Pixar. Keep your eyes on the Pixar Week tag page for more updates, or just watch the front page!]
We’re doing something different with our review of Up. Rather than going the typical route of a main review with mini-reviews added on, there are gonna be three mini-reviews within this post, which follows the two previous deeper analyses. If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read them both and see what you do and don’t agree with for each of Tom and Max’s reviews. To give you a summary of what they said, keep reading to preview what their final scores were, as well as blurbs from Glenn and myself.
Tom Fronczak: 6.65 – Okay. To say it all in a single sentence, the first third of Up was amazing, but the rest of the movie failed to do much of anything great, and to call this film overall a great movie, is a slap in the face to a few other Pixar films that truly deserve that acclaim for consistently being amazing scene-for-scene. Up does not deserve that same acclaim.
Glenn Morris: 6.75 – Okay: Viewing Up again merely reconfirms my initial reaction to it. The first fifteen minutes are right alongside WALL*E in terms of emotional depth. The adventure is an absolute thrill upon initial takeoff but as talking animals start bouncing around and campfire sharing takes care of character development in a lazy manner, I begin to let my Pixar flag sag. Shortly thereafter, a senior citizen barely able to walk out his front door at the outset of the movie is running down a mountain skipping across jagged rocks with the skills of a parkour champion and I’ve resigned to the idea that Pixar’s late breaking maturity was a temporary sprint.
Geoff Henao: 8.00 – Great. Up is unique in Pixar’s repertoire of films as it hits the audience with one of their strongest introductory scenes to date. After they knocked you over and brought you to your knees, co-writers/directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson lift you up from the ground the same way the main character, Carl (Ed Asner), lifts his house from its foundation. What then transpires is an adventure full of action, suspense, emotions, and the re-discovery of life after love.
Max Roahrig: 10 – Perfect. Up is a rare kind of movie. The kind that comes around maybe every ten years if we’re lucky. It’s the kind of movie that can meditate on life, and still tell a good entertaining story. It can kick your heart in the ass in the first twenty minutes, and then make you laugh hysterically half an hour later. It’s a welcome change to the current climate of movies, and I for one, welcome it with open arms.