Up

Up is an upcoming computer-animated 3-D film being produced by Pixar Animation Studios. It will be distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, and is scheduled for release on May 29, 2009 in North America and October 16, 2009 in the United Kingdom. The film is directed by Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter and features the voices of Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai and John Ratzenberger.

Plot
Carl Fredricksen (Edward Asner) is a retired 78-year-old balloon salesman. When Carl was a child, he met and eventually married a girl named Ellie who grew up in a small midwestern town. Ellie always dreamed of visiting South America, but she died before she got a chance. Now, when developers threaten to move him into an assisted living home, Carl decides to fulfill his promise to Ellie. To accomplish this, he uses a huge number of balloons to make the house fly - but unwittingly takes a chubby eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer named Russell with him. The two opposites match up for thrilling adventures as they encounter wild terrain, unexpected foes, and all the terrifying creatures that wait in the Venezuelan jungle.

Cast

 * Edward Asner as Carl Fredricksen. Docter and Rivera noted Asner's television alter-ego Lou Grant had been helpful in writing for Carl, because it guided them in balancing likeable and unlikeable aspects of the curmudgeonly character.
 * Jordan Nagai as Russell, the boy scout stowaway on Carl's flying house. He accompanies Carl in order to earn his "assisting the elderly" badge: the only one he doesn't have. Docter auditioned 400 boys in a nationwide casting call for the part. Nagai showed up to an audition with his brother, who was actually the one auditioning. However, Docter, who had passed on other potential voices that sounded too artificial, realized Nagai behaved and spoke non-stop like Russell and chose him for the part. Nagai was seven years old when cast.
 * Christopher Plummer as Charles Muntz, an adventurer whom Carl and his wife admired when they were children. Pete Docter compared Muntz to Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes.
 * John Ratzenberger as a construction worker.
 * Bob Peterson as Dug, a dog with a collar that translates his thoughts into comical sounding English.

Other characters include Kevin, a large tropical bird that Russell names, and more dogs with the collar that Dug has; Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.

Story
The fantasy of a flying house was born out from director Pete Docter's thoughts about escaping from life when it becomes too irritating, which he explained stemmed from his difficulty with social situations growing up. Writing began in 2004. Actor and writer Thomas McCarthy aided Docter and Bob Peterson in shaping the story for about three months. Docter selected an old man for the main character after drawing a picture of a grumpy old man with smiling balloons. The two men thought an old man was a good idea for a protagonist because they felt their experiences and the way it affects their view of the world was a rich source of humor. Docter was not concerned with an elderly protagonist, stating children would relate to Carl in the way they relate to their grandparents.

Docter noted the film reflects his friendships with Disney veterans Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Joe Grant (who all died before the film's release). Grant gave the script his approval as well as some advice before his death in 2005. Docter recalled Grant would remind him the audience needed an "emotional bedrock" because of how wacky the adventure would become; in this case it is Carl mourning for his wife. Docter felt Grant's personality influenced Carl's deceased wife Ellie more than the grouchy main character, and Carl was primarily based on Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau, because there was "something sweet about these grumpy old guys". Docter and Jonas Rivera noted Carl's charming nature in spite of his grumpiness derives from the elderly "hav[ing] this charm and almost this 'old man license' to say things that other people couldn’t get away with [...] It's like how we would go to eat with Joe Grant and he would call the waitresses 'honey'. I wish I could call a waitress 'honey'."

Docter created Dug as he felt it would be refreshing to show what a dog thinks, rather than what people assume it thinks. The idea derived from thinking about what would happen if someone broke a record player and it always played at a low pitch. Russell was added to the story at a later date than Dug and Kevin; Carl's relationship with Russell reflects how "he's not really ready for the whirlwind that a kid is, as few of us are". Docter added he saw Up as "coming of age" tale and an "unfinished love story", with Carl still dealing with the loss of his wife. He cited inspiration from Casablanca and A Christmas Carol, which are both "resurrection" stories about men who lose something, and regain purpose during their journey. Docter and Rivera cited inspiration from the Muppets, Hayao Miyazaki, Dumbo and Peter Pan. They also saw parallels to The Wizard of Oz and tried to make Up not feel too similar. There is a scene where Carl and Russell haul the floating house through the jungle. A Pixar employee compared the scene to Fitzcarraldo, and Docter watched that film and The Mission for further inspiration.

Design


Originally, Carl would have flown to a desert island, but Docter deemed this too cliché and made Venezuela the film's setting after Ralph Eggleston gave him a video of the tepui mountains. In 2004, Docter and eleven other Pixar artists hiked up a tepui and spent three nights there painting and sketching. Pixar also visited Brazil to observe the plants and rock formations, which Docter decided "we couldn't use. Reality is so far out, if we put it in the movie you wouldn't believe it." The film's creatures were also challenging to design because they had to fit in the surreal environment of the tepuis, but also be realistic because those mountains exist in real life. The filmmakers visited Sacramento Zoo to observe a rare pheasant for Kevin's animation.

Docter wanted to push a stylized feel, particularly the way Carl's body is proportioned. The challenge on Up was making these stylized characters feel natural, although Docter remarked the effect came across better than animating the realistic humans from Toy Story, who suffered from the "uncanny valley". Cartoonists Al Hirschfeld, Hank Ketcham and George Booth influenced the human designs. Simulating realistic cloth on caricatured humans was harder than creating the 10,000 balloons flying the house. New programs were made to simulate the cloth and for Kevin's iridescent feathers. To animate old people, Pixar animators would study their own parents or grandparents and also watched footage of the Senior Olympics. The animators modeled Russell on Peter Sohn, the Pixar storyboarder who voiced Emile in Ratatouille, because of his energetic nature.

A technical director worked out that in order to make Carl's house fly, he would require 23 million balloons, but Docter realized that number made the balloons look like small dots. Instead, the 10,000 balloons created were made to be twice Carl's size.

Release
Up will be the first Pixar film to be projected in Disney Digital 3-D. The film will make its premiere by opening the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and it is the first animated film to open the film festival. It will be accompanied in theaters by the short film Partly Cloudy, directed by Peter Sohn. Whenever the film is screened at the El Capitan Theatre from May 29 to July 23, it will be accompanied by Lighten Up!, a live show featuring Pixar's characters.

Among the children's books that will be published to promote the film is My Name is Dug, which was illustrated by screenwriter Ronnie del Carmen. Despite Pixar's track record, Target Corporation and Wal-Mart will stock few Up items, while Pixar's regular collaborator Thinkway Toys will not produce merchandise, claiming its story is unusual and will be hard to promote. Disney acknowledged not every Pixar film would have to become a franchise. Characters from the film will appear in an Aflac commercial, while Cluster Balloons will promote the film with a replica of Carl's couch that will be lifted by hot air balloons, that journalists can sit in.