Up is a 2009 American computer-animated comedy-adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. The film premiered on May 29, 2009 in North America and is the first animated film to open the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. The film was released in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2009.

Up is director Pete Docter’s second feature-length film after Monsters, Inc., and features the voices of Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson, and Jordan Nagai. It is Pixar’s tenth feature film and the studio’s first to be presented in Disney Digital 3-D, and is accompanied in theaters by the short film Partly Cloudy. The film was also shown in Dolby 3D in selected theaters.

Production

The fantasy of a flying house was born out from director Pete Docter’s thoughts about escaping from life when it becomes too irritating, which he explained stemmed from his difficulty with social situations growing up. Writing began in 2004. Actor and writer Thomas McCarthy aided Docter and Bob Peterson in shaping the story for about three months. Docter selected an old man for the main character after drawing a picture of a grumpy old man with smiling balloons. The two men thought an old man was a good idea for a protagonist because they felt their experiences and the way it affects their view of the world was a rich source of humor. Docter was not concerned with an elderly protagonist, stating children would relate to Carl in the way they relate to their grandparents.

Docter noted the film reflects his friendships with Disney veterans Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Joe Grant (who all died before the film’s release and thus the film was dedicated to them). Grant gave the script his approval as well as some advice before his death in 2005. Docter recalled Grant would remind him the audience needed an “emotional bedrock” because of how wacky the adventure would become; in this case it is Carl mourning for his wife. Docter felt Grant’s personality influenced Carl’s deceased wife Ellie more than the grouchy main character, and Carl was primarily based on Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau, because there was “something sweet about these grumpy old guys”. Docter and Jonas Rivera noted Carl’s charming nature in spite of his grumpiness derives from the elderly “hav[ing] this charm and almost this ‘old man license’ to say things that other people couldn’t get away with [...] It’s like how we would go to eat with Joe Grant and he would call the waitresses ‘honey’. I wish I could call a waitress ‘honey’.”

The filmmakers’ first story outline had Carl “just wanted to join his wife up in the sky,” Docter said. “It was almost a kind of strange suicide mission or something. And obviously that’s [a problem]. Once he gets airborne, then what? So we had to have some goal for him to achieve that he had not yet gotten.” Docter created Dug as he felt it would be refreshing to show what a dog thinks, rather than what people assume it thinks. The idea derived from thinking about what would happen if someone broke a record player and it always played at a low pitch. Russell was added to the story at a later date than Dug and Kevin; his presence, as well as the construction workers, helped to make the story feel less episodic.

Carl’s relationship with Russell reflects how “he’s not really ready for the whirlwind that a kid is, as few of us are”. Docter added he saw Up as a “coming of age” tale and an “unfinished love story”, with Carl still dealing with the loss of his wife. He cited inspiration from Casablanca and A Christmas Carol, which are both “resurrection” stories about men who lose something, and regain purpose during their journey. Docter and Rivera cited inspiration from the Muppets, Hayao Miyazaki, Dumbo and Peter Pan. They also saw parallels to The Wizard of Oz and tried to make Up not feel too similar. There is a scene where Carl and Russell haul the floating house through the jungle. A Pixar employee compared the scene to Fitzcarraldo, and Docter watched that film and The Mission for further inspiration.

An inspiration for the character Charles Muntz was cartoon producer Charles B. Mintz who stole Walt Disney’s hit character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from him forcing Disney to create replacement character Mickey Mouse. Mintz, like Muntz, did get his comeuppance in real life.

Docter made Venezuela the film’s setting after Ralph Eggleston gave him a video of the tepui mountains. In 2004, Docter and eleven other Pixar artists spent three days reaching Monte Roraima by airplane, jeep and helicopter. They spent three nights there painting and sketching, and encountering dangerous ants, mosquitos, scorpions, frogs and snakes. They also flew to Matawi Tepui and climbed to Angel Falls, as well as Brazil. Docter felt “we couldn’t use [the rocks and plants we saw]. Reality is so far out, if we put it in the movie you wouldn’t believe it.” The film’s creatures were also challenging to design because they had to fit in the surreal environment of the tepuis, but also be realistic because those mountains exist in real life. The filmmakers visited Sacramento Zoo to observe a Himalayan Monal Pheasant for Kevin’s animation. The animators designed Russell as an Asian-American, and modeled Russell after similar looking Peter Sohn, a Pixar storyboarder who voiced Emile in Ratatouille and directed the short Partly Cloudy, because of his energetic nature.

Docter wanted to push a stylized feel, particularly the way Carl’s body is proportioned: he has a squarish appearance to symbolize his containment within his house, while his wife’s body is shaped like a balloon. The challenge on Up was making these stylized characters feel natural, although Docter remarked the effect came across better than animating the realistic humans from Toy Story, who suffered from the “uncanny valley”. Cartoonists Al Hirschfeld, Hank Ketcham and George Booth influenced the human designs.Simulating realistic cloth on caricatured humans was harder than creating the 10,000 balloons flying the house. New programs were made to simulate the cloth and for Kevin’s iridescent feathers. To animate old people, Pixar animators would study their own parents or grandparents and also watched footage of the Senior Olympics.

A technical director worked out that in order to make Carl’s house fly, he would require 23 million balloons, but Docter realized that number made the balloons look like small dots. Instead, the balloons created were made to be twice Carl’s size. There are 10,927 balloons for shots of the house just flying, 20,622 balloons for the lift-off sequence, and it varies in other scenes.

Music

Up is the third Pixar film to be scored by Michael Giacchino, after The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Giacchino wrote a character theme-based score that the filmmakers felt enhanced the story of the film. “Muntz’s Theme” is the first piece of music heard in the film when it starts out as a celebratory theme during the newsreel at the beginning and echoes when Carl and Russell meet Muntz 70 years later. “Ellie’s Theme” is first heard when she and Carl first meet as children and plays several times throughout the film whenever Carl thinks about her. At the end of the film, during the climactic battle between Carl and Muntz, the orchestra plays “Ellie’s Theme vs. Muntz’s Theme.”

The score was released as a digital download on May 26, 2009, three days before the movie opened in theaters.