Up

It's been nearly a decade now since Pixar eclipsed Disney's traditional animated-film studio as the genius behind the company's big-name family releases, and I'm starting to wonder what that means. Disney films were a huge deal when I was growing up; I only learned later that I was living through the second golden age of Disney film.

You could make the case that the streak never ended, that the what-are-they-putting-out-next-year excitement -- and critical acclaim -- was simply transplanted to Toy Story's successors around the time I got my driver's license (and I took dates to both Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo).

But the two shops are very different. Much as I love the Pixar canon, we haven't seen another sweeping epic like Beauty & the Beast or The Lion King. Maybe robots, fish, and domesticated superheroes don't have that kind of acting chops. Pixar films can be just as mature, but they tend to sell it in a lighthearted, ironic manner.

Briefly, I thought their latest offering, Up, was about as good as most people are saying. Which is to say it was very, very good: deep, affecting, heartbreaking, delightful, and so on. Beauty & the Beast scored a best-picture Oscar nomination for the 90s Disney films; you could make the case that it's Pixar's turn.

And Up is a very adult movie. Peter Suderman makes the case that Pixar has essentially turned the family film formula on its head: Whereas typically such a film aims for a second-grade level, with just enough inside jokes to keep the parents entertained, Pixar movies tend to explore grown-up themes through the conventions of childrens' entertainment.

Suderman, granted, wants Pixar to dispense with the flying houses and talking dogs entirely and make a serious adult film. I'm not so sure, mainly because I keep thinking about how good it must be for kids to see this.

It's clear that the studio takes its role as an educator very seriously. WALL*E, essentially a crunchy-con morality tale, proved that sufficiently. Up, meanwhile, upends the typical "believe in your dreams" pablum we like to forcefeed the kiddies by using Carl's unfulfilled dream to explore adult themes like loss and regret. That's one of the many wonderful things about the opening montage of scenes from Carl and Ellie's life together: It puts in front of its youthful audience, in a direct but understated manner, a whole range of emotions they haven't felt yet.

Especially powerful (and technically impressive) was the time the opening devoted to the couple losing their unborn child. In no more than 10 seconds, the film clears a major plot hurdle (why doesn't Carl have kids who can take care of him?), delivers an emotional beatdown, and teaches an important lesson about the responsibilities of adulthood. Without it, the rest of the film becomes problematic, and Carl and Ellie's dream of seeing Paradise Falls looks more like selfish escapism than the ennobling aspiration of a couple that was denied the adventure of raising children. With it, it's no surprise that the film ends with Carl experiencing a sort of December fatherhood.

Again, this is no Beauty & the Beast, with its ever-present themes of sacrifice and honor and its dramatically magical landscape. (One of the endearing things about Up is that it only wants you to suspend disbelief so much: Talking dogs are out of the question, for instance -- unless they have nifty GPS/translator collars.) Pixar movies in general have been almost aggressively bourgeious, with the nuclear family unit -- think The Incredibles -- often the central setting.

What does such a shift betoken? I could only guess. I think I've heard it remarked that film is often an exercise in nostalgia -- in trying to capture for the future a world that's quickly fading away. Maybe we're seeing such a phenomenon with Pixar: a sudden golden age of childrens' films that reflect deeply on the values and choices that shaped past generations just as that society is on its last legs. Or it could be evidence of the staying power of such values.

Of course, none of this really matters unless the kids actually watch it. That, I'd imagine, is the lurking fear behind my former colleague John Podhoretz's semi-contrarian review, in which he argues that, for all its just acclaim, Up is at points a fairly boring movie.

I don't quite see it. Then again, I was one of the few people I knew who thought the opening sequence in WALL*E -- in which the eponymous robot wanders alone over a deserted Earth -- was far too short.

But Podhoretz's main thesis is still an intriguing one. He argues that even if Up were a boring film, no one would say it; so powerful is the Pixar brand. Pixar movies, he says, are now an "object of cultural piety," something that everyone in polite society is simply required to acclaim. He worries that, long-term, reaching such status means death for an institution's creative power.

So: Does that mean Pixar gets its Oscar nod after all? I could think of worse things.