Movie Reviews: Pixar's "Up"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Up
14 May 2009 2:32 AM, PDT

Film critics attending the Cannes Film Festival, who ordinarily hone their scathes on the opening-night film (in 2006 The Da Vinci Code, the last U.S. film to open the festival, was loudly booed at the press screening during the closing credits) lofted Disney/Pixar's Up to heights of praise usually reserved exclusively for Cannes's arty-est competitors.

Indeed Stephen Applebaum acknowledges in his review in The Scotsman: "It left critics on the Croisette feeling buoyant yesterday, which makes a change from opening movies in recent years."

Few disagree.

"Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever" is the way Michael Rechtshaffen in the Hollywood Reporter describes it.

"It really is a lovely film," writes Peter Bradshaw in Britain's Guardian newspaper, "funny, high-spirited and sweet-natured, reviving memories of classic adventures from the pens of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne, and movies like Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon."

Indeed, the Lamorisse classic is mentioned in numerous reviews, but only a single balloon figured in that small film; the new one features thousands, and the delights, the critics suggest, are a thousand fold.

"This is a wonderful film," Roger Ebert writes in his "unofficial" review in the Chicago Sun-Times. (He's saving his "official" one for the U.S. opening on May 29.)

Ebert reserves most of this review for a lengthy criticism of 3D, which, he insists, degrades the vibrant color of animated film.

His advice: "Find a theater showing [Up in 2D], save yourself some money, and have a terrific visual experience."


Recalling Walt Disney's admonition to his animators that "for every laugh there should be a tear," Peter Howell in the Toronto Star writes that Up is "one of the most emotional movies Pixar has ever made."

To be sure, a few critics appear about as steadfastly grumpy as the central character in the movie, a 78-year-old voiced by Edward Asner (who often sounds eerily like Lionel Barrymore's definitive Scrooge).

Kaleem Aftab writes in the London Independent, "Once the adventure moves into its obligatory action denouement, it enters a world of stereotypes that disappoints" with "blockbuster moments [that are] surprisingly uninventive."

And Joe Morgenstern writes in the Wall Street Journal that he was left "with an unshakable sense of Up being rushed and sketchy, a collection of lovely storyboards that coalesced incompletely or not at all."

-IMDB News

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Up
28 May 2009 2:36 AM, PDT

Disney/Pixar's Up is being greeted with a chorus of "Arriba!"s from critics in cities where it is being previewed tonight (Thursday). Virtually every critic is awarding it four stars.

Roger Ebert, who hailed the film, when it opened the Cannes Film Festival two weeks ago, piles on the praise thicker in his "official" review in today's Chicago Sun-Times, calling the film "another masterwork from Pixar." It is, he writes, "a story as tickling to the imagination as the magical animated films of my childhood, when I naively thought that because their colors were brighter, their character outlines more defined and their plots simpler, they were actually more realistic than regular films."

Claudia Puig in USA Today concludes her review by remarking, "Easily the summer's, and probably the year's, most enchanting movie, Up is a buoyant delight."

Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune notes that Disney stockholders may have preferred that the filmmakers had cranked out another Cars in order to exploit the merchandising possibilities. "While I realize the crucial role black ink plays in Pixar's continued artistic health and well-being, I say: More power to these people. They are making the best films coming out of contemporary Hollywood."

And Michael Sragow says succinctly in the Baltimore Sun: "Everything about Up is an up." (Addtional reviews of Up will appear here on Friday.)

-IMDB News