Chad Taylor

On the edge: Up

The last 3-D film I saw was Jaws 3-D. It required painful eyewear and the sharks were stop-animated to preserve the effect of three dimensions. Fear alas was not one of these, nor was entertainment. For viewers who knew anything about the first Jaws or sharks (or films, for that matter) the experience was heavy going. Think aquarium ornaments wiggling muddily across a red lava lamp and you have the idea. As a result, despite James Cameron and Peter Jackson and Jeffrey Katzenberg loving the 3-D, I've been immune to the prospect of watching movies in stereo. If it's a story, it'll work on plasterboard. Since the cavemen and so on, blah blah.

Pixar may well have faced the same skepticism with their first digital animated features. How could a computer improve on the loveliness of hand-painted animation, let alone original pencils? Even so, I felt a flicker of hesitation (about 12 frames) when a friend invited me to a preview of Pixar's Up. Love to see it. Oh, in 3-D? Should I bring aspirin?

No fear. The new 3-D system works. The eyeglasses are tinted (Polaroid?) lenses. You can read through them like sunglasses. They are Ray Ban shaped and don't make you look like a dork. My host, already burdened by eye wear, simply popped the 3-D glasses over the top and remained completely presentable in the modern Joaquin Phoenix stylee. Everyone in the preview theater, in fact, looked pretty cool.

The film itself also functions. Visually and thematically, Up contrasts precipices with cosy internal spaces: the unknown with the known; flight with stability. The character design for Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner) was my least favourite; his sidekick Russell (Jordan Nagai) was better. The winners were the animals - the bird and, oh boy oh boy, Dug the talking dog, voiced by Bob Peterson, who also wrote the screenplay. A skit on the talking ape in Michael Crichton's Congo (I am sure), Dug's dog-thoughts are enabled but not educated by a voice-making collar. Blank yet perfectly observed, he soon becomes the star of the film.

The story hangs in two halves: Fredrickson loses his wife, and then goes on an adventure. His loss is the story's premise and his motivation but it's a wobbly fit with the eccentricities of the second half: I couldn't quite reconcile the "reality" of his dilemma with the explorer, his zeppelin, the primate collection, the importance of the bird and the army of - oh, well, you will see. Such wilful fun-ness seemed like a deliberate compensation for the grimness of the first five or ten minutes.

I am wary of watching children's movies in public. I've seen most of Pixar's and tend to break into sniffles. Toy Story 2 was the worst, peaking with Jessie's heart-string lament but there are many other examples. A NYT critic recently noted that the modern trend of infantalising "adult" movies stands in contrast to children's animations which are embracing more substantial themes. I think that's always been the case with children's movies in general -- something dark runs through the Disney canon, often around the two-thirds mark, and there's always Old Yeller. When I realised Up was going to address the subjects of death and loss (hey kids!) I braced, but by the end the mood was very... ah, yes. Now I see.