above: NOT Ed Asner in UP, but close.Ah, yes, the yearly visually-sumptuous Pixar entry arrived, complete with the failsafe formula of the underdogs winning the day/learning the lesson/getting the girl (or losing the girl and getting the Asian-looking cub scout, in this case) that usually involves some gut-busting laughter hand in hand with tear-jerking pathos. And a talking dog. And a dirigible.
Honestly, I just don't feel that jazzed about this one to write too much about it. I mean, yeah, it's good, it's nice looking, there really are some laugh out loud moments, usually involving Doug the talking dog or a big bird swallowing something and spitting it back up, and some moments that make a grown man whimper (as long as he's in a room by himself with no sports equipment/posters/pages/illustrated nearby), but somehow I just didn't really get invested. When I first saw the trailer for the film, I made the false assumption that the old dude in the film lost his wife when the two were very young, thereby setting up the reasons for his crotch-like nature. Nope. They live a long, healthy life together, and then, yeah, she dies. You know what? My grandfather died twenty-five years before my grandmother. IT HAPPENS EVERY DAY!! I just couldn't feel bad for the fact that life got in the way of some promise he made when the two of them were kids and she had Austin Powers-like choppers. And of course, the child in our adventure is a typical Pixar one-parent kid a la the kid in TOY STORY (am I wrong to be sexually attracted to the single mom in TOY STORY? Kill me now) or Nemo in FINDING NEMO. Pixar LOVES divorce and/or death of a spouse! And as soon as the kid mentions a story of sitting on a curb with his dad counting cars, you KNOW how the movie's gonna end. Bleh.
And our villain is...let's face it, lame. Yes, he owns a dirigible. Yes, he has a whole museum of zany shit in said dirigible. Yes, he has an army of talking dogs that can fly bi-planes. But by the time said bi-planes enter the picture ( in the typical beautifully animated edge of your seat climax of a Pixar film ), I'm just apathetic to the whole thing.
The voices are fine. I just finished watching the exemplary JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED t.v. show from Warner Brothers, and whenever I hear Ed Asner, all I hear is him doing the voice of the outrageous Granny Goodness (see above picture - yeah, voiced by Lou freaking Grant = AWESOME!!). Doug the dog comes off the best, but the joke is sort of ruined by the trailer. There's a funny little poop joke (That's right, kids, always shovel the hole BEFORE releasing the Kraken) and I laughed out loud at the "Cone of Shame" (specifically due to my fond memories of my childhood dog Luke wearing that cone after a minor operation), but it just didn't grab me.
I want to set aside a paragraph for the music. As my dear friend the Mysterious Greg O. can attest, in early 2001, I played a game on the PS2 called MEDAL OF HONOR. I was so taken by the music in this game that I ordered the music from the manufacturer (I'm something of a movie soundtrack snob). The music was composed and conducted by a fellow Italian that I'd never heard of: Michael Giacchino. Now, if you know movies or t.v. at all, you know the name, and if not, you know the movies he's scored: T.V.'s ALIAS & LOST; THE INCREDIBLES, MI:3 & the recent STAR TREK reboot (yes - J.J. Abrams does love him, as do I). With this and the STAR TREK scores, I believe he cements himself as THE composer to watch into the next decade. And yes, I was there at the begining. So there.
And so, in closing:
HERE'S WHAT YOU WILL SEE:
-An old dude fight complete with flying dentures.
-2 tear-jerking montages that would make even the Campbell's chunky beefiest of us tremble like a little girl with a skinned knee.
-A dirigible. You simply can't go wrong with a dirigible.
HERE'S WHAT YOU WON'T SEE:
-Boobies. Actually, you don't really see any chicks in this one, not even those shapeless fatty chicks from WALL-E.
-Funny outtakes. Man, I LOVED these when they did them for A BUG'S LIFE and TOY STORY 2. They were great. There was farting in them. And monkeys.
-Ed Asner naked...and thank Christ for that.
Final grade: B
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