Seventy-eight-year-olds walking with the help of a stick rarely are lead characters on screen, perhaps even more rarely in animation. But Up— steered by two men with films like Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, Toy Story and Wall.E behind them—isn’t like any animation film you may have seen recently.

Carl (Asner) once had a dream: of being like his hero, the super adventurer Charles Muntz, who travelled around the world collecting unusual specimens. One day, he chances upon a girl who wants to do the same and they become friends. But like all dreams, this one too shrivels in the light of day. There isn’t enough money, there is the daily life, and before they know it, Carl and Ellie are old.

While he once imagined flying in a dirigible, he now sells balloons. Where he and Ellie once saw themselves steering aircraft, they now spend quiet evenings, holding hands. Ellie dies before they ever get to “the land that time lost”— Paradise Falls in South America — and then Carl decides to put the two things he has together rather than wait for things he may never have the time for. Tying thousands of helium-filled balloons to his house, he takes off.

What he hasn’t bargained for is an eight-year-old, overeager “Wilderness Explorer” boy scout, Russell (Nagai) riding along like a stowaway. Or that when he gets to the place he wants to in South America, he will be in danger of falling just short of Paradise Falls. Or that he will acquire the strangest of friends in the process: a bird that doesn’t fly, a dog that talks. As the adventure he always sought stays just out of his reach, Carl is living a new one every moment making his way to it: whether it is flying high above in his house-plane, encountering stormy clouds, or learning to take care of the friends he has acquired. In one quiet moment, Russell tells him of his father who’s never around much. Of all the times he has spent with him, Russell says, “it’s the most boring that I remember the most… sitting by the roadside, eating the same ice cream every time, counting the cars”.

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