Rating: 3.5 of 5  

I shouldn’t be surprised that I loved Up, because Pixar is very good at what they do. But I don’t generally love animated movies so I didn’t expect much.

I didn’t expect really adorable characters that were surprisingly easy to relate to and care about. And I don’t even like dogs, so the fact that I liked the dog is kind of impressive.

I didn’t expect to laugh so much.

I did expect that there would be a bit of formula to the story and there was with Charles Muntz, who was a bit of a kind of stock character. But 80% of it all was so good, I can overlook the big action scenes at the end.

I certainly didn’t expect to cry as much as I did. But the emotional moments were so delicate, so poignant and so well earned they’re just fantastic. Totally make up for the places where the story is a bit obvious, because those moments were completely surprising and full of wonder.

That being said, animated movies are hard to score because I admittedly don’t know enough about the process to really know how much a director does and therefore how well they did it. I also don’t really know how to score performance because it’s just voice work, no matter how well done.

But the writing is easy to score because it’s great. It feels like, and I could be way off base here, but it feels like the writing of an animated movie is even more the essence of the film than a live action movie. Because what you see on screen is just the words and the pictures given to them without actors and props and cameras and editing takes. An animated director has so much more control over their environment and seems to work more closely with the writer because there’s fewer people involved (even though, in truth, there’s more people involved because there’s so many animators but it isn’t the same).

Anyway, obviously awesome writing and, I assume, pretty good directing and production and as good of performances as you can have when it’s just a voice.

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