On the Big Screen: THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (2017)

Lots of comic book fans hate Batman. I'm not just talking about Marvel Comics partisans -- though Lego Batman apparently hates them in return -- but also many DC comics fans who resent the idea, articulated by Lego Batman, that DC is "the house Batman built." For some fans the cult of Batman is a betrayal of everything superhero comics should be about. The idea that Batman, without super powers, can take down the entire Justice League of America singlehandedly --I've seen it done in comics -- really rankles these fans. Batman is a big buzzkill for them; the fantasies that fuel his popularity are antithetical to theirs. For many people the superhero idea is a fantasy of transcendence; what appeals is the idea of overcoming human limitations, to be able to do things literally impossible for humans. Yet here comes Batman to burst all those bubbles. His most hardcore fans, for the most part, like the leveling idea of someone who isn't naturally gifted (unless you count inherited wealth) being able to take out anybody, no matter how gifted they are. The important thing isn't what you (or your fantasy figure) can do, but that anyone and everyone else can be beaten. This Batman is an implacable nemesis, a black hole of ressentiment that sucks in and crushes other people's fantasies. But not all Batman fans see Batman that way. Many, at least a vocal minority over-represented online, have opposed the darkening of the Batman myth since the 1980s milestones of Frank Miller's comics and Tim Burton's blockbuster movie. The Lego Batman Movie is a critique of the "dark knight" myth from the perspective of an older alternate fandom (which acknowledges the character's nearly 80 year history in its sometimes embarrassing entirety) for whom a big part of Batman's appeal was the evolution around him of a "Batman Family," to use the title of a pre-Miller comic. But it's not really a satire of the Dark Knight, which is all too parody-proof, because Lego Batman -- analogous but not really identical to the character from The Lego Movie -- doesn't behave like the largely humorless Batman of modern comics and movies. Instead, Chris McKay's cartoon, from a story by Seth Grahame-Smith, satrizes those Batman fans who, in the view of their critics, have reduced Batman to the stunted creature on display here.

Lego Batman (Will Arnett) isn't much different from the overgrown manchildren of so many live-action comedies, except that he's explicitly even more adolescent in his flailing tantrums defying father-figure Alfred (Ralph Fiennes), who desperately encourages his charge to connect with the world, make friends, and take steps toward an adulthood equated with emotional intimacy. Lego Batman, who'd wear his cowl everywhere he went like El Santo if Alfred didn't prompt him to take it off for Bruce Wayne's social engagements, is entirely absorbed in his hobby of crimefighting, but remains detached even from those who share the hobby, including he criminals he fights. This is a Batman who doesn't get invited to Justice League parties; who breaks the Joker's (Zach Galifianakis) heart by refusing to acknowledge the clown prince of crime as his greatest enemy, or even to work up enough emotion to hate him; who so takes for granted his ability to defeat Gotham's small army of costumed antagonists, even when they all team up against him, that he never bothers taking them into custody. The story of the film is a three-front war to break Lego Batman's shell. Joker escalates his merry war by contriving to be sent to the Lego Phantom Zone, where the big bads of many a mythos are confined (including some shrill "British robots" whose name apparently couldn't be mentioned), so he can lead a mass breakout and invasion of Gotham City. New police commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) takes a more confrontational attitude toward the local vigilante than her retired father, but only in order to make him cooperate with rather than overshadow the police. Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), adopted absentmindedly by Bruce Wayne and encouraged by Alfred, simply wants to bond with his new father, or with his "second father," Batman. Enemies and would-be friends alike batter away at Lego Batman's emotional barriers, rooted in the founding trauma of his parents' murder (thankfully not reenacted yet again in this kiddie movie). Lego Batman's weakness, as many comics critics and fanfiction writers have long known, is his fear of forming ties that might abruptly be cut, but this only becomes a weakness once he faces a threat that he absolutely cannot defeat on his own, so long as he refuses to acknowledge that. Only when he lets his allies show their colors by wearing costumes as he does -- a "Reggaeman" costume shorn of its trousers becomes the traditional Robin uniform, for instance -- and only when he can own up to this true, deep hatred of Joker can the day possibly be saved....

The Lego Batman Movie adopts the visual style of The Lego Movie -- unlike various made-for-home-video Batman Lego movies, the characters move in the herky-jerky manner expected of Lego objects, and clouds, explosions etc. appear to be made of Legos -- but only intermittently exploits its Lego-ness, as when Batman acts as a Builder to make weapons and devices out of the landscape, or when characters exploit their inherent interconnectivity to make themselves into "human" bridges. Almost inevitably it's more Batman than Lego movie, though it's unique among Batman movies in its critical-though-loving take on the character. Anti-Batman comics fans and anti-"grimdark" Batman fans will enjoy the send-up of the stuck-up mainstream Batman and his pretentious antisocial fans, but both groups may leave theaters feeling that the film shot its wad in a way that makes a sequel difficult to imagine. To be fair, the filmmakers may not have planned on a sequel, but I'm sure Warner Bros. will want one. Only now they've used up Batman's entire rogues' gallery with the exception (I think) of Ra's al-Ghul, who isn't exactly the stuff of a Lego movie, and left it impossible for us to take any of them seriously, even in the context of a cartoon comedy. It always feels like a waste when someone makes an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink movie like this using all the characters in a "universe" at the same time, and I'm sure the particular fans of many classic villains will feel this more acutely. The right thing to do actually might be to spin this off into a TV show of half-hour adventures with individual villains, but the more likely thing is a Lego Justice League movie to make up for the underutilization of Batman's peers here. As an open-minded Batman fan who's enjoyed comics and movies with many different approaches to the character, I enjoyed Lego Batman, even though it probably was impossible for this new film to be the revelation or statement its predecessor was. I doubt it will change many people's attitudes toward Batman. Fans who'd like to see an expanding Bat-Family in comics and movies probably will be disappointed by DC and WB's continued pandering to the isolatos who buy most of the comics, and those buyers probably will dismiss this movie as stupid kid stuff. Given that the very idea of Batman can all too easily be dismissed as stupid kid stuff, that's not really much of a critique, but the fact that Batman's nature and what he means to readers or movie audiences can be so hotly debated suggests that neither the character nor his Lego incarnation should be dismissed quite so stupidly.

On the Big Screen: BRAVE (2012)

Pixar's new animated feature had a troubled production. It's not the first so troubled, but there's a political or cultural significance this time because Brave was supposed to have been Pixar's first feature directed by a woman. In the end, Brenda Chapman shares the directing credit with Brendan Chapman, while Steve Purcell is recognized as a presumably subordinate co-director. Pixar is our nearest equivalent to a classic Hollywood studio, so collective production is a fact of life. But because of the peculiar publicity Brave's shifts in personnel have received, reviewers seem inclined to look for seams in the finished product. It's assumed that Chapman's vision was compromised, and that assumption puts one strike on the movie before it even begins. While reviewers may think they're doing justice to Chapman, I think they're a little unfair to Brave. The new Pixar is doubly unique for its period setting -- ancient Scotland -- and its intense focus on a mother-daughter relationship. The latter detail gives the film considerable emotional power and archetypal weight. Deeper critics will have a field day with Brave -- and so will pornographic fan artists, I'm afraid.

On another level, Brave is familiar stuff; it's a Disney princess picture, a female coming-of-age story. But this time the heroine resists the coming of age, if that means taking a husband or living up to a queenly model of domesticity. Yet Merida doesn't come across as a daddy's girl. Her father, the king, certainly enjoys her tomboy antics and encourages her from an early age, but she doesn't really go running to him for solace when she argues with her sometimes doting, sometimes daunting mother Eleanor. There's actually a sort of realism here, since Dad was probably off campaigning most of the time. Merida's primary bond is with Eleanor, and that's why their arguments over the daughter's duties to the dynasty are so painful to both of them. Merida precipitates the picture's crisis because she wants her mother to change -- her attitude, that is. There is, without spoiling things (Pixar has been quite coy about the main event of their film), more change than Merida bargained for, and in a way what befalls Eleanor serves as a kind of metaphor for Merida's own coming of age. It stands in for the often-"gross" realization that your parents are sexual creatures just as you come to appreciate what that means. In an ingeniously cartoonish way, Eleanor undergoes a rite of passage on Merida's behalf, with the ironic payoff, given the suspenseful threat of a permanent change, that both mother and daughter are changed -- presumably permanently -- for the better. Whoever's idea that was, it's kinda brilliant.

If you want to see a Pixar picture in a theater, you have to sit through trailers for other people's 3-D animated features. This is instructive. It puts Pixar's achievements, and Brave's in particular in perspective -- in relief, really -- if you sit through a promo for the next Ice Age film or a teaser for the Despicable Me sequel, or even the preview for Disney's own Wreck-it Ralph before the feature presentation. Frankly, the point is usually made by the end of the annual short, like this year's La Luna. Throw Brave into the scales and the comparison is unfair. Working in heroic-fantasy mode, Pixar is in a new place and the results are stupendous. Even the fault-finders acknowledge the achievement of animating Merida and her flaming red hair and I can only second the acclaim. The character animation is terrific nearly across the board, the exceptions for me being Merida's triplet younger brothers, who seem only blandly cute, especially when they go through changes of their own, compared to our fleeting glimpses of a younger Merida. They're a disappointingly generic element of a picture that rarely goes wrong. It may be telling that the one sequence that really falls flat is the film's one real attempt at anachronistic humor, a gag featuring a magical Dark Age version of an automated answering service. If you expect to see predictable corporate-mentality elements in the picture it isn't too hard to find them -- but they don't come close to defining Brave. Maybe it isn't anyone's personal vision in its final form, but it's far from impersonal. Brave may prove but a respite from a Pixar decline, given that next year's feature is the third sequel in four years, but it definitely proves what the studio is capable of in convincing fashion. If this was a troubled production, maybe smooth sailing is overrated.

On the Big Screen: THE ILLUSIONIST (L'Illusioniste, 2010)

Jacques Tati is France's greatest comedy director. He's also considered the only true heir of the great American slapstick comedy tradition, which itself was derived to some extent from the work of an earlier Frenchman, Max Linder. Tati made talking pictures, more or less; a lot of the dialogue in his features is gibberish, particularly that of his own signature character, Monsieur Hulot. Usually portrayed as an inventor or at least a tinkerer, Hulot cuts an awkward figure in a world modernizing beyond anyone's control. In time, Tati's comic vision expanded beyond the focus on Hulot as a uniquely dysfunctional bumbler. In his later features, Playtime and Trafic, modernity makes everyone look silly and Tati's social vision becomes all-encompassing. The style can be off-putting; it may even look like a lack of style, while the films can seem to be about nothing, when they're really about everything. They require and reward attentive viewing. Playtime, in particular, may be my favorite French film. But like Buster Keaton, Tati gave in to a temptation to gigantism, though his vision may have required it. Playtime lost lots of money and bankrupted Tati, and he never fully recovered. He died with a final screenplay, Confusion, unproduced.

Jacques Tati was usually rendered in caricature in the advertising for his films. Turning him into a cartoon character was probably a natural next step.

Unless someone takes up the challenge of Confusion, Tati's final screen utterance now becomes a screenplay he wrote and abandoned in 1956, as interpreted by animator Sylvain Chomet. According to biographers, Tati was apparently working out some family issues through this screenplay, which would have had him playing a character quite different from Hulot. He put it away to make another Hulot film, Mon Oncle, which became his greatest global hit. Chomet has revised the 1956 screenplay to set it in 1959, the time when the real Tati was at the peak of his fame, while his cartoon analogue, the magician Tatischeff (the comedian's real name), is near the end of his tether. Chomet even has a scene in which Tatischeff briefly blunders into a theater where Mon Oncle -- the real film, in live action -- is playing, just so he can stage an eerie moment in which the filmed Tati on the screen within a screen appears to recognize and react to the appearance of the cartoon Tatischeff in the movie house. The choice of time seems to be Chomet's comment on the contrast between the troubled Tati who wrote the original Illusionist script and the triumphant onscreen Tati of roughly the same period.

Leaving Tati's biography aside, there's a more obvious and more stark contrast here for his fans and fans of the comedy tradition in general. Assuming that Chomet's adaptation faithfully reproduces what Tati wrote, the comedian isn't just not doing Hulot; he's doing someone else. He's doing Charlie Chaplin.

Specifically, of course, Tati wrote for himself the role of a mediocre French magician (calling him Tatischeff is presumably Chomet's idea) who's wandering further and further afield in search of an audience. In Chomet's version, Tatischeff travels to Great Britain, where he suffers numerous professional humiliations. In London, he closes a bill headlined by a ludicrous rock band; by the time he takes the stage, all the teenyboppers have departed, and he performs for a bare handful of bored patrons. At some sort of prom concert, he's upstaged by a Scottish drunkard. The drunk befriends him, however, and helps arrange some gigs in his home country. In the drunk's home town, Tatischeff is upstaged by a new jukebox, but he makes a heroic impression on Alice, an adolescent ragamuffin barmaid. When Tatischeff decides to try his luck in Edinburgh, a starstruck Alice runs away to join him. A reluctant Tatischeff allows her to share an apartment with him, devoting most of his meager income, either from his act or from odd jobs he's compelled to take on, to buying her new clothes and other treats. They stay at the Little Joe Hotel, operated by two midget brothers and catering to the dregs of show business: a suicidal clown; an alcoholic ventriloquist; three inane acrobats. For Tatischeff, the dwindling opportunities to ply his craft grow more humiliating. He's finally reduced to conjuring women's accessories in a department store window, while Alice grows enamored with a promising young man, one with whom Tatischeff realizes her real future lies. But she probably won't take that route unless Tatischeff quits her life once and for all....

However much Chomet has tinkered with the script, The Illusionist inescapably reflects the influence of Chaplin's 1952 film Limelight on Tati. In Limelight Chaplin is a washed-up vaudevillian who becomes a mentor for a suicidal ballerina. The sixtysomething Chaplin flatters himself enough to imagine the girl having a crush on the old man, whose renunciation in favor of youth takes the indirect form of death on stage at a moment of redemptive triumph. Tati/Chomet strips the Limelight formula of the romance (and the mortality) while adding a City Lights inspired litany of amusing odd jobs for Tatischeff to perform for the girl's sake. Illusionist aims at Chaplinesque pathos in a way Tati never does in his Hulot movies, but achieves something closer to the bleak, self-pitying pathos of Harry Langdon, refusing to offer audiences the uplift of never-say-die perseverance on the metaphorical road of life. It ends, not with the clown-hero's apotheosis, but with utter defeat and the promise of nothing but oblivion for the protagonist. This is a comedy with the moral, "Magicians do not exist." It's so funny I forgot to laugh.

Actually, I laughed quite a bit at the slapstick parts of the picture and the moments of period parody. On top of that, I admired the audacity, impossible to imagine in America, of someone making such a soul-crushing spectacle the subject of an animated cartoon. Better still, The Illusionist is a triumph of old-school line animation, though there are several obvious CGI assists along the way. As an artist, Chomet has made a beautiful film. As an animation director, he has created a wonderful homage to Tati. The cartoon Tatischeff is hardly an exaggeration of Tati's own physical schtick. The real Tati was a tall man with storklike legs and a rocking, off-balance gait. Were he to come to a sudden stop, you'd worry that he'd fall forward on his face. Chomet nails this. The other characters seem artistically rather than generically conceived and realized, as far from Disney as you could want. Whatever Tati's intentions, Chomet turns The Illusionist into a showcase for the narrative power of animation. Because so much of the dialogue is Tati-esque gibberish, Chomet can't depend on the glib jokiness on which even the best American animation relies to keep audiences interested. What I'm getting at is, I'm not sure what people who know nothing about Jacques Tati will get out of Chomet's film -- most likely they'll find it a colossal downer, if an extremely pretty one. But as far as I'm concerned, as a technical and artistic achievement it just knocked Toy Story 3 off the throne I'd put it on. That film is still a tremendous effort in its own right, but The Illusionist is the best animated film of 2010 -- though it has about nil chance of beating the Pixar for the Oscar -- and one of that year's best movies of any kind.

On the Big Screen: TOY STORY 3 (2010)

Let's be reasonable. The new Toy Story film doesn't surpass its predecessors, but there's no shame in being just about as good as they were. The first film got the whole Pixar feature film thing going, while the first sequel remains my favorite Pixar feature. The third film, appearing 11 years after Toy Story 2, doesn't really expand the Toy mythos the way the 1999 film did. Toy Story 3 consists mostly of variations on themes from the earlier movie, and while it's being treated as the conclusion of a trilogy, it almost accidentally left me with less sense of closure than the second film did.

The new picture fulfills the implicit prophecy of Toy Story 2 that a time would come when Andy Davis would leave behind Woody, Buzz Lightyear and their pals the same way Woody's thematic partner Jessie had been abandoned by her original owner. Andy's a sentimental kid, even at college age, and can't bring himself to throw out his last remaining toys (our core cast from the previous movies, including Jessie and Bullseye the horse); he plans to take Woody away with him while relegating the rest to the limbo of his mom's attic, where they have at least the hope of redemption in another generation. But through the usual happenstance most of the gang find themselves in danger of being taken away as garbage to the city dump, only to end up as a mass donation to the Sunnyside daycare center. The prospect of perpetual playtime with waves of children appeals to most of them, but Woody insists that they are all still Andy's to dispose of as he pleases. Convinced that Andy meant to dump them, the other toys are happy to remain at Sunnyside while Woody attempts a breakout. They soon learn that not all play is good play; as low toys in the pecking order dictated by Lots O'Huggin Bear (a tremendous voice performance by Ned Beatty), they're at the mercy of toddlers who mindlessly abuse them. Their resistance to Lotso's hierarchy turns them into prisoners plotting a mass escape while Woody plans to break back in to rescue them....

Once I read that the new movie would involve toy abuse at a daycare center I started wondering what point John Lasseter, director Lee Unkrich and writers Michael Arndt and Andrew Stanton wanted to make. On the simplest level Sunnyside is an ideal setting for a prison break storyline, but the place reminded me less of a prison than of a refugee camp. That's the sort of place where a faction of inmates could take over by force or intimidation and take control over the distribution of necessities and privileges. Our heroes are clearly displaced "persons," and if you see them that way you begin to think that a daycare center, no matter how benignly operated (as Sunnyside will be, eventually) is a proper final destination for them. Lotso upholds Sunnyside as an ideal alternative to the perpetual heartbreak of toy life; there will always be more children to play with the daycare toys. "No owners, no heartbreak," he says, in a way we suspect is meant to be proven wrong.

The first two Toy Story films were fables about the social construction of identity, if I can be pretentious for a moment. The meaning of "You are a toy!" one one level, is that you aren't just what you think you are. Buzz is not simply the space ranger he's programmed to think he is; Woody and Jessie are not simply the privileged collectibles Stinky Pete tempts them to think they are. Their true identities are defined by play (and their interactions with each other in toy society) and belonging. For a toy, not to be owned is to not fully live. Lotso, like Jessie, had an owner in the distant past, but suffered an even more traumatic break -- the sort you can imagine some of the other toys suffering, especially Buzz. Unlike Jessie, Lotso found an alternative society in the institutional life of Sunnyside. He rejects the idea of ownership, of his own belonging, and we learn that behind that rejection and his benign exterior is an all-encompassing hatred that makes him one of the most vicious of Disney villains. That extends to self-loathing: "We're all just trash!" is his angry comment during a confrontation with Woody's crew, and that sentiment makes him willing to condemn our heroes to death: absolute physical destruction in the hellish furnace of the city dump. Lotso is an extreme case of a malign institutional mentality; others in his clique will prove more amenable to rehabilitation. The film lets you conclude that Lotso's bitterness predated his institutionalization, which only hardened it, while the privileged toys in the Butterfly room with the older children probably don't find the institutional life oppressive. Objectively speaking (as far as possible when discussing a cartoon about living toys) it's a good thing that toys are there for the daycare kids, while it's a better thing in story terms if the toys share toddler detail in the Caterpillar Room more equitably. But in the end Pixar tells us it's better for toys to be owned by individuals. You can read that as a "family" value (Andy's toys identify themselves as a family in one scene) or read some political point into it, but if any of the creators have an axe to grind, they do it subtly enough not to bother anyone.

Lotso's failing is his refusal to let his hurts heal in the only way available to toys; by going through another generation of play. It's never been stated explicitly to my knowledge, but ever since Toy Story 2 I've assumed that toys must forget their pasts at some point, including past owners. When he was first unwrapped, after all, Woody must have thought of himself as the hero of that old TV puppet show, just as Buzz thought of himself exclusively in terms of his manufactured mythos. Yet he has no memory of any of it when he meets the rest of the Roundup Gang, and despite being as much as fifty or sixty years old, he has no memory (that he speaks of, at least) of any owner besides Andy. If any of Andy's other toys are hand-me-downs, they don't let on. Jessie's tormented history and relatively recent re-immersion into the world of play leaves her with still-fresh memories of her past, but if I'm right about Woody we should expect him and the others to forget Andy eventually. Will they forget the mortal peril they experienced in this film? Will they experience it for the first time again next time? I hope I don't spoil anything by stating that Toy Story 3 has a happy ending, however bittersweet it may also be, but everything we've seen over the three films leads us to assume that this ending is only temporary. So is it that happy? How do we know that they won't end up in the dump fifteen years from now? Will that be time for Toy Story 4? Or will virtue be rewarded from generation to generation until WALL-E finds our playful friends?...

In my book, the fact that a cartoon can raise such questions is a point in its favor. The Toy Story films are broad enough to be seen or read from many different angles. At different moments I thought that the toys could represent either parents or children, or even an adolescent's first break-up. That flexibility's another good thing. This film in particular has a lot of good things going on. It has a bravura opening with the core cast in a necessarily freakish Wild West setting that I suspect shows up Jonah Hex in all of a minute -- though it may also leave you wondering whether Andy grew up to write Jonah Hex. Ned Beatty I've already praised; he brings some Seventies redneck gravitas to this venture that gives it an extra edge. Kudos also to Michael Keaton as Lotso's lieutenant, a Ken doll who partly confirms my theory of toy forgetting by not recognizing Barbie and also proves the bad toys' potential for redemption. Overall, this film worked better for me as a drama as a comedy. There's plenty of good humor, but the creative team goes yet again to the well of "demo-mode" Buzz, while his later transformation into a stereotypical Latin Lover through the wonder of a Spanish-language option is just stupid. The film's climax is a little too much deus ex machina, though it does pay off a three-film old running gag, while Lotso's comeuppance didn't seem sufficient for his villainy. The early reviews had led me to expect a more violent film, and there is a moment when you probably will believe that some familiar characters have been destroyed. That moment keeps you in suspense through a harrowing sequence that seems to offer no way out for our heroes, but the resolution, including Lotso's fate, seems anticlimactic. The same goes for Pixar's usual end-credit gag reel, which on this occasion undercuts the emotional power of the story's actual finale.

But there's no denying that Pixar has indeed done it again. We can debate what awards Toy Story 3 may deserve, but I'd say they may as well give John Lasseter the Thalberg Award for Pixar's incredible run of popular and critical success. And to answer the question from the start of the weekend, I'd tentatively place this movie at #4 in my list of favorite "third" films, between The Return of the King and Son of Frankenstein. I'm not sure yet where I'd rank it in the Pixar canon, except that it's not number one. It will rank fairly high, though, and that'll place it in pretty exalted company.

UP (2009): A Haunted House and the Spirit of Adventure

There's a lot of outlandish action in the latest Pixar feature, and that's only to be expected. The outlandishness isn't usually worth remarking on. Ideally, you should feel no cause to question, for example, how a civilization of sentient automobiles without fingers or thumbs could build or use tools, not to mention cities. Nothing in Up is that outlandish, apart from the physics that lift the balloon-borne Fredericksen house off its foundation and allow it to outrace an engine-driven dirigible. Carl Fredericksen's athletic feats are pretty outlandish, I suppose, for someone I guesstimate to be in his early eighties, and normally that shouldn't bug me in a cartoon. This is, after all, cartoonish action, the kind of severe slapstick that doesn't really hurt anybody. A pack of dogs go over a cliff in failed pursuit of our heroes, but we soon see them all dogpaddling to safety. Three more dogs are piloting attack planes (it's a cartoon!) with hostile intent, but Carl tricks them ("Squirrel!") into crashing their planes together. We immediately see all three pilots parachuting earthward. Even the villain is sent off with enough helium balloons, by Up standards, to assure him a chance to plot his revenge. All of this should be normal, or par for the cartoon course, but this time it bugged me. This time the nobody-dies rule of Pixar's roller-coaster mayhem had me asking: in a cartoon world like this, why does anyone have to die? And yet...

I know a joke! A squirrel walks up to a tree and says, 'I forgot to gather nuts for the winter and now I am dead.'...It is funny because the squirrel gets dead.

- Dug the dog

The shadow of death stretches across the whole length of Up. As every reviewer notes, the film opens with a capsule narrative of Carl Fredericksen's life, focusing on his early friendship and lifelong romance with Ellie, a tomboy fellow adventure fan. Their love endured despite constant disappointment, from their failure to have children to their inability to follow their shared childhood dream to the lost world of Paradise Falls. This opening section closes with a grim reversal as Ellie, who could once outrace her fatbodied husband up their favorite little hill, grows too feeble to make the climb while Carl waits to surprise her with plane tickets for their belated adventure. In a moment of movie time Carl is a widower who feels that he failed his wife. For Pixar this downbeat business is almost a matter of showing off, fresh proof that they can hit all the emotional notes. It's the bleakest bit of theirs since Jessie's flashback of abandonment in Toy Story 2, and it can't help leaving the impression that Up has something to do with inexorable aging and eventual death. So when Carl goes on to perform practically superhuman stunts later in the movie, only betraying his age when it makes a good gag, that seems to belie or betray the message of the opening section. But that can't be what Pixar meant to do, could it? Some critics have complained about the film's relapse into conventional roller-coaster ride action, but there has to be a point to it, and that point has to have something to do with the first part of the film.

The adventure begins when Carl, once a balloon salesman at the local zoo, uproots his house with the help of thousands of helium balloons. He hopes to reach Paradise Falls and fulfill his late wife's dream of visiting the place. The house is where they first met back in the Thirties, when it was an abandoned eyesore that Ellie had turned into her private clubhouse. They bought it and cleaned it up after they married, and as Up proper opens it's the last residential structure on a block given over to large-scale development. It's a relic in more than one sense. For Carl, it's a symbolic representation of Ellie. In some scenes, he seems to address the house as if it was Ellie or housed her spirit. In a sense it does, but it also stands for Carl's unfulfilled dreams and his burden of grief. Its metaphorical weight shifts as the film goes on, from the inspiration that lifts him away from the mundane modern world to a burden to which he's tethered that gets in the way of his real responsibility. We're meant to eventually see it as something he has to let go as a way of finally letting go of Ellie, but he can't do that until he undergoes something like a mystical dream experience.

There's nothing so magical as an appearance by Ellie's ghost. In this respect, Up sticks to the rigor of the opening section; Ellie is gone and never coming back. But there is a little posthumous communication that becomes the decisive thematic moment of the film. If it's posthumous that's Carl's fault. Blinded by despair and grief, he missed a message Ellie tried to send him before she died. Anyway, Carl might not have been ready to accept the message or learn its lesson until he put himself through his ordeal at Paradise Falls.

A Fredericksen family talisman is "My Adventure Book," a scrapbook Ellie started compiling before she met Carl. The last page she touched for a long time was the one marked, "Stuff I'm Going to Do," which was meant to chronicle her lifetime of exotic adventure. The book is put aside for awhile after she marries Carl, but he puts it back in her hands to take her mind off the grief of losing her chance at children. It is now meant to chronicle their adventures that they were never able to afford. On her deathbed, Ellie passes the scrapbook back to Carl, but he can't bring himself to contemplate all the empty pages until he makes a final effort to straighten the house up after the latest disaster at the Falls. Then he discovers that the later pages weren't empty.

This discovery forces Carl to think hard about the meaning of the word adventure. If any word defined both his and Ellie's aspirations, that was it. It's a word they associate with their childhood idol, the explorer Charles Muntz, who flew in the dirigible "Spirit of Adventure" and had as his motto, "Adventure is out there!" The Fredericksens aspired to follow Muntz to Paradise Falls, where he disappeared back in the Thirties while searching for a rare giant bird. As it turns out, Muntz is still alive and still hunting, a hale and hearty centenarian, when Carl reaches his destination. He also forces Carl to reappraise the meaning of adventure. That's because Muntz, whom little Carl and Ellie saw as an unfairly treated martyr, proves to be a greedy, egotistical, paranoid exploiter and vivisectionist. Only now does Carl learn the modern lesson that an exotic giant bird isn't something for Muntz to capture and exhibit on stage, but a creature that has a right to its own life. And only after Carl comes to question Muntz's idea of adventure does he learn an alternate definition from Ellie.

Ellie had filled the remaining pages of her Adventure Book with photos of her married life. It's a collection of photos of their happy times together, closing with scenes of their old age. On the last page is her parting message to Carl: "Thanks for the adventure. Now go have a new one." Well, hasn't he? Not yet, he realizes, because he had still believed that adventure was something "out there," as Muntz says. To the contrary, Ellie says, like a gentler version of Marley's ghost, that mankind, or life itself, -- represented throughout the main story by Russell the well-meaning but annoying little stowaway, -- is the true adventure. But it's most likely that Carl couldn't fully absorb this lesson until he had his disillusioning encounter with Muntz. He needed to have a mystic experience in order to appreciate the life he still had -- and thus Up reveals itself as a variation on the theme of It's A Wonderful Life.

The remodeled house is the most obvious invocation of Capra's film, while the Fredericksens are a George and Georgette Bailey with a lifetime of deferred dreams. Like George Bailey, Carl needs to realize that he's had a wonderful life, and it might not have been enough for Ellie to tell him so. But the problem isn't that Carl wishes he hadn't been born. Things weren't that bad for him. His problem is that he thinks he hasn't fully lived. So his house (figuratively a vehicle for Ellie's soul) takes him to Paradise Falls to give him a belated chance at the adventure he craved as a child, and an opportunity to discover its limitations. And if we accept the entire balloon adventure as a spiritual intervention (albeit without a visible guiding spirit at work) then that resolves the apparent inconsistency in tone between the somber realism of the opening section and the essentially magical events later on.

Having established all that, I think Up is a pretty amusing film and the usual Pixar wonder of computerized animation. Dug the Dog's joke about the squirrel is probably the funniest thing I've heard in a 2009 film and it's all in the dumb deadpan and somehow plausibly alien delivery. The character animation and sight gags are great as always. Ed Asner, who voiced Carl, should get some sort of award for his work. But there are things I didn't like, like Russell; I never warmed to the little butterball and his too-obvious role as surrogate for the son that Carl never had. I especially didn't like the treatment of the Muntz character, whom the film transforms from someone like the original Carl Denham (his unveiling of the bird skeleton struck me as a quote of Kong) to something more like Peter Jackson's Denham, a callow weasel. Is the heroic explorer archetype so offensive to modern sensibilities that any such character has to be an oaf or a monster? But that's not an aesthetic judgment, just a personal one. Overall, Up is another solid hit for Pixar, but probably their least effective film since the studio adopted a yearly schedule. A weak Pixar still outclasses most of the CGI competition, though, and this film's peculiar difficulties actually provoked thoughts that ended up enriching the thing for me. Most of today's cartoon features provoke no thoughts at all. They don't exactly have to, but the fact that Up did earns it my critical approval.

In Brief: WALL-E (2008)

Last year's Pixar production has won the Village Voice 2008 film poll of independent critics. To give you an idea of the company the film keeps, and the proclivities of the critics, Flight of the Red Balloon was the runner-up, and Happy Go Lucky took the bronze. The Voice reaches Albany about a week behind New York, so I discovered this news today, just as I was returning the DVD that I'd watched the night before.

Pixar is just uncanny. I go through an annual cycle with the studio. When I see the first previews of the next production, I tell myself, "This one can't work! They're going to blow it this time." They can't do human characters! A movie about anthropomorphic cars? No way! A rat that likes gourmet cooking? Forget about it! A lone robot on a deserted planet? Who are they kidding? Each time I talk myself out of going to the theater for the new one, and even now I'm going through the same thing with Up. Now that one really looks lame -- the same way they all do.

As a matter of fact, I haven't seen a Pixar feature in a theater since Toy Story 2 -- the only one that was basically pre-sold. Furthermore, my inability to place my trust in the brand name, despite all evidence, means that to this day I haven't seen Monsters Inc. (an aversion to Billy Crystal has much to do with that, actually) or Finding Nemo (for reasons unknown even to myself). But since then the studio has gone from triumph to triumph, except that I'm always late figuring it out. Most remarkably, they've maintained a consistent high quality while increasing their output to a movie every year. Pixar mastermind John Lasseter probably should be ranked with the great creative producers of the golden age studio system for the quality control he sustains.

I'm not about to say that WALL-E is Pixar's best yet. To be honest, I haven't given much thought to ranking the studio's output. I will say that the present film is one of the most successful sci-fi visions I've seen in some time, from the skyscraping junkpiles of the abandoned Earth to the borderline-misanthropic satire of corporate consumer culture (it never does cross over; these films should have happy endings) on board the Axiom. The screenplay succeeds in having things both ways, investing its robots with gamuts of emotion while rendering their barely articulate. The protagonists communicate with extremely limited vocabularies of one or two word statements (their own names, "plant," "directive," etc.) yet the cumulative effect is to vest those minimal utterances with far more emotional power than you'd expect. And if you have a problem with robots feeling lonely, longing for romance, enjoying Hello, Dolly! on VHS and so forth, you need to remind yourself that you're watching a cartoon or ask yourself what you're doing in the room. Once you get over that, you can just enjoy the extraordinary production design, the wealth of sight gags, and so on.

Nor am I about to join the consensus and say that WALL-E is the best film of 2008. There's still too much of that year left for us to see up in Albany, with Gran Torino just arriving tomorrow and The Wrestler coming next week. But when I consider myself qualified to compile a list, it will certainly be there.

I can't leave the subject without addressing a topic that's nagged me about the movie since it came out. The EVE robot reminded me of something in the way it (or she) floated about, its eyes, its color scheme, etc. I did some checking up, and my memories didn't quite match historic reality. But then I had a different thought that tied everything together. What if our romantic robots were to, somehow, for some reason ... well, you know. Reproduce, I mean. Romantically, that is. The following might not be so far from the likely result. He even seems to be in the right setting. Discuss...