The first golden age of Hollywood animation occurred in the late 1930s and early 40s when Walt Disney produced a succession of feature-length masterpieces beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and continuing with Pinocchio and Bambi. Then, in 1992, Beauty and the Beast, the best Disney cartoon for half a century, ushered in a second golden age.This has reached new artistic heights through the work of the Pixar company which became part of the Disney organisation, made necessary the creation of an Academy Award for best feature-length animated film and has helped give computers a good name. It's latest production, Up, made in 3D, is co-directed by Pete Docter and Bob Petersen, who have worked on most Pixar productions including both Toy Story films. It's one of its best: touching, funny and graphically exciting.
Pixar offers exceptional value, invariably opening with a dazzling short and closing with final credits that keep popular audiences (though not, I'm sad to say, film critics) sitting in their seats to the very end. Its last film, Wall-E, for instance, which Docter scripted, was preceded by Presto, a brilliantly frenetic five-minute cartoon directed by Douglas Sweetland, in which an Edwardian music hall magician is challenged by his fiendishly rebellious assistant, the rabbit Alec Kazam. I was almost exhausted with laughter and in need of a rest before Wall-E even started.
Pete Sohn's somewhat gentler Partly Cloudy, the curtain-raiser for Up, is a wholly delightful affair and tangentially related to the full-length film it precedes. Storks pick up bundles from anthropomorphic clouds to deliver to grateful earthly homes. Most are packed with cheerful pussycats, puppies and human babies. One stork, however, is tasked with carrying a succession of increasingly difficult passengers, including an aggressive goat, an alligator, a porcupine, a shark and an electric eel. These creatures do far more than ruffle his feathers until he stoically arms himself for the fray.
At the centre of Up is Carl Fredricksen (gruffly voiced by Ed Asner), a curmudgeonly widower and retired balloon salesman in late middle age. He's rather like the characters Walter Matthau specialised in or a less offensive version of Clint Eastwood's ex-factory worker in Gran Torino.
We first see him as a schoolboy, his youthful sense of adventure whetted by the appearance of his hero, Charles F Muntz (Christopher Plummer), in a black-and-white newsreel shown in a cinema back in the 1930s. Muntz travels the world in his airship, The Spirit of Adventure, visiting exotic places and collecting strange animals, and Carl and his spirited childhood sweetheart, Ellie, are determined to emulate him.
In a moving, dialogue-free sequence, Carl and Ellie marry, do up an old Victorian house and grow old together, but unfortunately cannot have children. They put money into a glass jar to fund their journey to the mythical Paradise Falls in South America, but they have to break it open to pay for a series of accidents and Ellie is dead before they have the chance to leave home. This echoes the story of George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.
Then the film slips into Wizard of Oz mode when Carl's wooden frame-house (rather like the one behind the couple in the Grant Wood painting American Gothic) is threatened by property developers. He accidentally injures a builder, is denounced as a danger to the public and faces a future in a retirement home.
Rebelling against his fate, Carl attaches several thousand toy balloons to the house and takes off into the blue yonder, bound for Paradise Falls. Unbeknown to him, an accidental stowaway, the nine-year-old Russell, a plump, dead keen Wilderness Explorer, a sort of Boy Scout, is aboard. He'd been hoping Carl would help him win a badge for helping old people. Eventually, the two bond on their way to Paradise Falls, and the irascible Carl discovers both the son he never had and his own youthful self by fulfilling the adventure he and Ellie didn't manage.
But after dragging their house across the rugged South American terrain in the manner of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, they meet a friendly, 15-foot bird of paradise and have a disillusioning encounter with the man obsessed with tracking it down, the celebrated explorer Muntz. This obsessed sadist lives alone on his airship tethered in the jungle with slavering dogs he's taught to speak and to kill and thinks only of restoring his early fame.
Muntz seems largely inspired by the adventurer-film-maker Merian C Cooper who in the 1930s made two movies back to back using the same sets: King Kong and the thriller The Most Dangerous Game, about a reclusive genius, forerunner of the Bond villains, using a pack of ferocious dogs to hunt intruders on his domain. Both these films are evoked in Up, which features a number of inventive, superbly drawn chases on land and in the air that are as exciting as the best action movies of recent years.
Yet at the end, what we most remember are the characters: the lovable Carl, hiding behind his protective shell and cherishing his memories of Ellie; the eager, idealistic Russell; and the exotic bird; and Dug, the talking dog, who attach themselves to them. The moral is the familiar one that Dorothy discovered on returning from Oz – that the bluebird of happiness is to be found in your own back yard. But it is accompanied by another message, the one Muntz has failed to grasp – that fabulous creatures of nature should be left to live in their native habitats rather than snared and brought into captivity.
