Pixar’s “Up” a Weak Story?
Writing story is left brain logical, too.
Good movies have a clear structure of premise, resonant themes, three acts and character motivations that drive the plot. What makes the story original is the right brain’s creative use of this structure.
For a fine artist, the paint, brushes and canvas are like the structure, but how they go on the canvas is the creative use of the structure, ie, mixing paint, strokes and image composition.
Weak story structure does not make for a bad movie, but everything else equal, it makes a movie better.
Nobody has been better at crafting great stories than PIXAR. But according to my favorite movie reviewer, Joe Morgenstern, at the Wall Street Journal, their latest release, UP, is less than stellar. I like his reviews because he interviews in this context. He is not too happy about the characters, and the way the story switches tone throughout. His review here, summarized below.
“Up” dares to explore the full sweep of a man’s life, from young love, shining hopes and tragic loss to the perplexities and possibilities of old age. In the spirit of candor, accompanied by regret, I must say that I admired the film much more than I enjoyed it.
…there’s an admirably intransigent quality to [the] portrait of Carl as a widower, living alone in the home that he and [his wife] once shared. By now the once-pastoral house is surrounded by urban hubbub, and Carl is under pressure from all sides, a melancholy old man who looks like a cross between a scrunched-down Spencer Tracy and the bucket of a front loader. That’s when life forces itself on him in the corpulent person of 8-year-old Russell (Jordan Nagai), a relentlessly earnest Asian-American Junior Wilderness Explorer who is shaped like a top and bent on earning an assisting-the-elderly merit badge.
It’s also when my first doubts set in. Russell is amusing, in an insistent way, but he’s so repetitive that you wonder if he’s meant to be mentally challenged, and he becomes as much of a strident nuisance as Carl first makes him out to be. Carl, for his part, sustains a likable façade of Buster Keaton gruffness, but that wears thin and repetitive too.
You want to love the old geezer, just as you want to love your grumpy grandpa, and you’re grateful to the filmmakers for steering clear of sentimentality. Yet the characterizations are fairly coarse cartoons, in contrast to the emotionally rich cartoons that have become Pixar’s hallmark. They’re more schematic than organic, and that applies to the plotting as well.
I think this scene says it all…
[qt:http://movies.apple.com/movies/disney/up/up-snipetrap_h.480.mov 480 280]
Once the trip is under way, with Russell on board and stormy weather evoking the flying house in “The Wizard of Oz,” the movie undergoes a mood transplant. Paradise Falls turns out to be a land of spectacular beauty populated by creatures who wouldn’t be out of place in a routine Disney feature: a big, rare and endearingly droll flightless bird named Kevin, a pack of vicious dogs tracking him down — the dogs may be terrifying for very young children — and one breakaway member of that pack, Dug, who proves to be the definition of geniality and the soul of canine loyalty. (We know this for a fact because he wears a high-tech collar that translates his doggie thoughts into human words.)
One of the film’s recurrent grace notes is a coalescing of puffy clouds into concrete forms — whatever the beholder wants to feel and see. The same holds true of the film itself. It provides the characters and visual poetry on which to project our deepest feelings about the persistence of love, the power of friendship and the joy of embracing life toward the end of life.
…the early reviews preceding the Cannes debut have been ecstatic. I’m still left, though, with an unshakable sense of “Up” being rushed and sketchy, a collection of lovely storyboards that coalesced incompletely or not at all.
The one exception, apart from that silent montage, is the movie’s most ephemeral element, the music. Mr. Giacchino has written some marvelous scores — for Pixar’s “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles,” as well as for the new “Star Trek.” This one, though, is something else — touching, lilting, swooping, stirring, heartbreakingly elegiac… The music is what the movie wanted to be.
Trailers and clips at the Apple site…
1 comment
I think Morgenstern is even more crotchety than Carl. 98% of reviewers liked Up. That makes him one of just 3 out of 155 reviewers that couldn’t find something to smile about. That’s a near record for a recent release – right up there w/ Finding Nemo.
I just find it hard to trust someone who is in the extreme minority on a subjective issue like this.