Top of the Otts in Film #10: Up!

10. Up!

I was going to say that I’d lavished enough praise on this gem, but then I started writing about it and couldn’t stop.

Up!’s title bids us take a balloon ride out of our cynical age, up from a life of what-if’s, to soar amidst an eager child’s optimism and a bygone era’s romanticism. In so doing, Pixar has played the same trick that J.M. Barrie pulled on the original Peter Pan audience, seating adults next to children unburdened by the cares and dangers that seek to drag Up!’s, Peter Pan’s, and our own inner-monologue's protagonists down. In so doing, Up! pulls us, as adults, back to the wonder, the possibilities, of our childhood. Much ponderous literature storms and stresses over the fall from innocence. These tales, no matter how intellectually compelling, are inevitably emotionally unsatisfying because there is a part of our hearts that is a bitter partisan of the pre-fall hero, the innocent. We never forgive the author for showing us what came before the fall. Up! dispenses with this in the first 10 minutes of the film, telling the fall as the set-up in 10 minutes of wordless genius more artfully written than any of Salinger's mawkish prose. Just warmed-up, Up! then lets down from the sky its humbler miracle: a ladder for us back up to the heavens from which that innocence crashed.

So, yeah, that's why I liked it better than Finding Nemo.