UP. Russel>Carl>Kevin.

The latest wonderful movie from the geniuses at Pixar, Up at last brings us an adventure that so cheerfully and confidently goes against the grain of today's culture over-fixated on youth by presenting a hero that also happens to be a curmudgeonly old man. Most family adventure stories present their protagonists as the typical young gung-ho personalities that are at times actually too callow to realistically deal with their surroundings and as a result the adventures themselves are often so considerably dumbed down. This film, by centering on an older hero who has retained a nugget of adventurous idealism his whole life allows all the characters and story to have more real emotions and stakes.

The film first opens with wide-eyed, 7-year-old adventure scout named Carl Fredricksen, who dreams of going to a lush place in South America called Paradise Falls. He then meets his match in a girl named Ellie, another young explorer who shares the same dream and is even more avid than Carl is. This at first seems like the setup for a typical children’s adventure but then quickly and surprisingly segues into a lovely opening montage of their eventual courtship and later marriage. They save money to pursue their dream of traveling to Paradise Falls but everyday life and welfare intervenes with their savings. A tire breaks down, the house needs repairs and hospital bills stack up particularly as Ellie becomes progressively ill in their older years. This montage that is so impeccably and movingly told without dialogue and serves as merely the setup for our 78-year old protagonist, Carl (Ed Asner) and the rest of the movie is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Soon, Carl is left as a widower and is then threatened to be placed in a retirement home. So what does he do to honor Ellie’s memory and fulfill their dream without ever actually stepping outside his home? He tethers thousands of balloons to his house to float it to the sky. Everyone who has seen the poster or the previews already knows that but the sequence of the house making its ascent in its entirety is a pure, colorful marvel to behold on screen, particularly with the equally elegant score by Michael Giacchino, as it perfectly captures that blithe feeling one gets when seeing a hot air balloon lift off the ground.

Just when Carl is about to relax by himself all the way to Paradise Falls, however, he suddenly hears a startling knock on the door and finds that there is a stowaway on board, an Asian-American boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who is aspiring to be an adventure scout not unlike how Carl was when he was young. Carl, being the initially cranky man that he is, finds him a nuisance particularly after due to his earlier encounter with Russell and his unusual persistence to help out an elderly man for a merit badge from his scout leader. Of course, Carl does not have the option to kick him out of the house (although there is a brief, funny fantasy moment in which he fleetingly entertains that thought).

Much more about their eventually very touching bond and the rest of their adventure, I would hesitate to reveal, including the villain of the story that Pixar wisely makes a point of not revealing too much and does arrive as something of a meaningful surprise in this one. What I will mention are some ingenious, inspired sights and ideas in the film. One is how they skewer the old, silly cliché of talking dogs with some dogs Carl and Russell encounter. Audiences have complained for years about how dogs moving their mouths to talk about humans always look so ridiculous, no matter how hard they try to make it convincing with special effects (the truly awful Good Boy! comes to mind from several years back). This movie comes up with the brilliant, satirical solution of having collars around the dogs’ necks that hilariously act like ventriloquist sound devices that translate the dogs’ thoughts into human language.

As aforementioned, Up, like all true and great family movies, will appeal to kids and adults in different ways but I would particularly recommend that grandparents take their young grandchildren to see this or vice versa. By having younger audiences cheer for a hero who carries a lifetime of experience and heart and the adults identify with a hero who rejuvenates himself through adventure, watching this could bridge some gaps that neither they nor their grandparents knew existed. And if that sounds a bit too serious, only the Pixar folks can combine that with an exuberant adventure that resists conforming to Hollywood clichés and familiar genre conventions.

Russell, je t'aime: O