![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/up-pixar.jpg\" "\\"Russell")
<\/a><\/p>\n1) We paid the extra couple of bucks to watch in 3-D. The 3-D was so well-done, so utterly natural and looked so good that we all stopped noticing it after the first fifteen minutes. Not really worth the money.<\/p>\n
2) Why is everyone saying this film is such a weepy? Yes, right at the start of the film (in the film’s best sequence), the main character meets a girl, falls in love, gets married, has a long and happy lifetime with his love, and then she dies once they’re both in old age. We should all have misery like that.<\/p>\n
Because I had heard so many “bring a hanky” comments, I really expected a major character (maybe the dog?) to die at the end of the film. This probably improved the film for me, since I actually thought a major character might die.<\/p>\n
3) The bad: Even for Pixar<\/a>, the lack of female characters in this movie is extraordinary; of two important female characters, one is the protagonist’s wife who dies in the first fifteen minutes, the other is a bird named Kevin. Why is Pixar unable to imagine a story with a female lead? Needless to say, it fails the Bechdel Test<\/a>.<\/p>\n 4) The good: The main character is elderly, which makes UP the only children’s flick I can think of to feature an old protagonist.<\/p>\n 5) The even better: The secondary protagonist, Russell, is a fat little boy — and there isn’t a single joke about his size, anywhere in the film. ((He does have trouble climbing a rope, but the way they depicted that didn’t emphasize his fat.)) A positive, non-buffoon fat character with no fat jokes — That’s pretty much illegal in a children’s movie, isn’t it?<\/p>\n Heather MacAllister<\/a> once said:<\/p>\n Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it\u2019s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n 6) In addition, Russell is a positive, non-stereotypical Asian character<\/a>, and the actor who did Russell’s voice, Jordon Nagai (who was seven years old when they cast the part), is also Asian-American. In a more reasonable world the race of actors doing the voices in animated films wouldn’t matter at all; but with major live-action movies casting white actors to play characters that were originally Asian (as in “21” and “The Last Airbender”), it’s nice to see Pixar go the other way.<\/p>\n 7) And by the way, good story, good animation, and lots of great visuals. The dog characters were pretty consistently funny, as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Spoiler warning!) 1) We paid the extra couple of bucks to watch in 3-D. The 3-D was so well-done, so utterly natural and looked so good that we all stopped noticing it after the first fifteen minutes. Not really worth … Continue reading