Reviewing - The Up Collection
One of Pixar’s most heartfelt stories has two accompanying short films - and to be honest, neither of them add much to the feature. That said, the original flick is a masterpiece - and the brand-new "Dug Days" captures so much more than the spirit of adventure from the 2009 flick. Carl Fredricksen is what’s up.
Up (****1/2)
In which we’re all crying within ten minutes
I’ve seen this too many times to be crying this much.
Up has the kind of insurmountable whimsical charm that Mary Poppins or a Little Golden Book has. They’re beautiful, young, and carry a nugget of gold within them. The scene where Carl’s house is leaving town is pure joy. It’s an impossible image, for sure. We can’t deny that there’s literally no way an old man could fill that many balloons single-handedly, cover them on his own in his backyard with enough tarp to weigh them down, and also string every single one through his fireplace. What was his plan for hooking up power or water to the house once he landed in Paradise Falls? And what are the rules of balloon flying? Realistically speaking, at a certain point in the film the house should’ve just sunk to the ground once there wasn’t enough balloon or helium to support it. None of this pop-a-few-and-descend-a-bit stuff. That’s not how flight works. But who cares – the image of a house floating through the sky with a million colourful balloons is just too fun to overthink.
Carl and Russell are every bit the classic Pixar duo. They’re polar opposites from each other, stuck together to achieve the same goal of getting Carl’s house to Paradise Falls. They’re hilarious together on their own, but they also get help from Dug the talking dog and Kevin the endangered bird. Kevin is my only problem with the film. As entertaining as he is, he doesn’t convey the sense of awe or majesty that you’d expect from a long-lost species. Think of that feeling you get when you see a dinosaur or King Kong or a unicorn in a movie. There’s a kind of jaw-dropping enchantment that falls over you if they’ve done it right. Here, Kevin is about as unimposing as can be. He’s funny, for sure, but I just don’t think I would’ve taken the same approach.
To be honest, though, that’s a pretty small gripe to have amidst the splendour of the rest of this movie. Everyone knows about that four-minute silent sequence near the beginning of the film where we see Carl and Ellie live their lives together. It’s just so freaking beautiful. It’s a scene comparable to the one in Finding Nemo where we watch Marlin and his wife attacked by that barracuda, in the sense that it creates the emotional gravitas that holds the rest of the film together. When the slightest object is rattled in Carl’s house, we all hold our breath because we know just how important those things are to him. And when Carl finally opens the ‘Adventure Book’ towards the end of the film, we get a moment of emotional resolution that still gets me right in the feels over a decade later. The life we have is an adventure no matter the twists and turns, no matter the triumphs or tragedies we face. And as hard as it can be to leave an old page behind, we can’t forget that no adventure is really over as long as we’re still capable of loving another person. It’s moments like this when I’m reminded of the difference between a family film and a kid’s movie – or of the difference between animation and cartoons. When we look at movies like this from the lens of “I’m too old for this”, we not only rob ourselves but we imply that good and beautiful stories are something to grow out of. C. S. Lewis once said that “a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest”. Up isn’t just about the old and the young – it’s a story for the old and the young.
And by the way, I really thought I’d be sick of the running “squirrel” gag. I am not. I am definitely still up for it.
George & A.J. (**1/2)
This isn’t really animation as much as it is an elaborate storyboard, which is why I was a little disappointed in it. The premise itself is a fun one: Carl Fredricksen’s balloon escape inspires other seniors to stage their own breakouts, with George and A.J. at the center of it all. Sound-wise, the story is executed well. I just expected something a bit higher-budget from Pixar. This wasn’t even released on the feature film’s DVD – it was apparently an iTunes exclusive or something like that. That might explain the cheap look it has. If this had been fully animated, I’d give it a better rating, but as-is it doesn’t hold a candle to any of Pixar’s other shorts.
Dug’s Special Mission (**1/2)
This short film spends over a full minute of its four-minute total runtime tying itself to the events of its feature-length predecessor. As a result, there isn’t much time at all to give us anything in terms of laughs. The ‘squirrel’ gag gets used again, but when there isn’t much else laugh-worthy in the narrative, it makes this moment feel like a last-ditched attempt to bank off of the humour of the original. Monsters Inc.’s “Mike’s New Car” was funny on its own legs – this really just feels like filler. Skip this.
Dug Days (****)
A wonderful surprise, Dug Days is genuinely funny, long enough to be meaningful, and one of the best odes to dogs we’ve seen in animation since Lady and the Tramp.
There’s been a number of Disney+ exclusive shorts that haven’t really deserved a place on the streaming platform. ‘Pixar Popcorn’ is too short to be much of anything, ‘Pixar in Real Life’ should be on YouTube instead, and ‘Myth: A Frozen Tale’ is a VR experience, not a short film. When I saw a teaser for ‘Dug Days’, I worried that it would follow the same formula of using well known characters to convince us to watch a 2 minute video where no one even talks.
I was so happy to be proven wrong. Of the five Dug Days episodes, each one is no less than eight minutes long (not counting credits), which makes it longer than any of the other shorts I mentioned and actually makes it feel like a genuine short film and not a scramble to release new content. Length aside, the content within is really what makes these episodes great. It’s an authentically ‘Up’ creation, with fun interactions between Dug and Carl that feel like no time at all has passed since the feature film first came out in 2009. Russell makes a welcome return as well – and at first I thought the voice acting was so spot on that I wondered how they’d found such a perfect vocal doppelganger. I later learned that they had utilized archived recordings of the original voice actor, and I’m all for that. Everything just felt right.
So yes, this series is a continuation of the Up franchise in one way or another. But it’s also a heartfelt look at the life of a dog owner. Dug’s narration of common everyday dog occurrences (like waking up, seeing a squirrel, or watching fireworks) is just terrific. I laughed out loud multiple times. This is Pixar at their best, when they take even small projects and turn them into something wonderful. For all the laughs that this series sets out to bring, there’s a real heart to the relationship between Carl and Dug that makes this show truly special. We’ll likely never get an Up 2, in part because Ed Asner (voice of Carl Fredricksen) passed away just three days before this series was released. But Dug Days proved that a heart-on-your-sleeve performance along with a talking dog is still a recipe for success.
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