- “Her babies! Kevin's a girl?”
- ―Russell realizing Kevin's gender
Kevin is the female tritagonist of Disney•Pixar's 2009 animated feature film, Up. She is a giant, South American bird and the main target of Charles Muntz. Due to his mistake of determining her gender, Russell named her "Kevin" after they met.
Background
Personality
Despite not being able to talk, Kevin has a very strong personality. Like most animals, she is friendly to those who have been friendly to her, but she will act hostile when she felt threatened, such as screeching at Carl Fredricksen when they first met, and she openly tried to attack Dug, pinning him down and screeching at him, her feathers rising in agitation. However, she can be playful and affectionate, such as gently tossing Russell into the air and nuzzling him affectionately, or mimicking Carl when he tried to shoo her away. She is also very curious, as seen when she tried eating balloons and Carl's cane. Strangely, she also has a taste for chocolate.
Appearances
Up
Kevin is a giant bird of the species that Charles F. Muntz has been searching for many years after scientists accuse Muntz that the skeleton he revealed was not a real skeleton of the "Monster of Paradise Falls" (despite the fact that the monster exists) so he sets off to find and capture the rare and elusive bird as a promise. However, Kevin managed to evade capture for an unknown number of years due to the fact that her home is situated in a labyrinth that Muntz dare not enter and that many of his dogs had gotten lost in.
Russell, who finds the bird along the way, immediately decides to name it "Kevin", though it is revealed that Kevin is actually a female. Russell continues to refer her as Kevin after that.
Apparently, Kevin also likes chocolate as she keeps trying to take a bite out of Russell's chocolate bar and can be lured using chocolate (which is a running gag throughout the film). When Muntz and his dogs discover that Carl and Russell are with Kevin which is the rare bird Muntz must capture, he and his dogs capture her and put her in a large cage in the Spirit of Adventure dirigible in which Carl and Russell were able to rescue her and escape from Charles Muntz before he captures her.
By the end of the movie, Kevin reunites with her three babies as Carl gives Kevin and her three babies his cane as a gift, as Carl and Russell leave Paradise Falls bidding a farewell to Kevin and her offspring.
Dug's Special Mission
Kevin makes very brief appearances in this short. She is first seen chased by Muntz's dogs while Dug notices the bird being chased. After Dug introduces himself, the three dogs scold Dug for stopping them from capturing Kevin as Alpha gives Dug a special mission to capture Kevin on his own. Alpha then asks Dug to watch over the boulder where Kevin passes through so Dug keeps an eye on the boulder to know if it doesn't roll down the hill. Despite this, Dug accidentally lets a pebble roll into the boulder that Kevin would pass through to only roll down the hill and foil the three dogs.
When Alpha tells Dug to stay in the hole so that he could be on the lookout for Kevin, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma see Kevin from a distance as she runs away while Dug goes down the hole and lands on the dogs, causing them to lose the bird again. Dug decides to do many tasks to help find and capture Kevin, but it only foils the three dogs as Alpha calls Muntz that Dug has caused the three dogs to fail in capturing Kevin. Despite being mentioned several times in this short film, she only makes brief appearances.
Disney Parks
Walt Disney World
A walkaround Kevin debuted in 2018 during the Pixar Fest event as a new addition to the Pixar Play Parade, featuring a small Russell riding her back. A Russell free version of this walkaround debuted at Disney's Animal Kingdom in February 2019.
Prior to this, a simple animated figure of Kevin's head and neck was a background element in the Up meet-and-greet that once existed at The Magic of Disney Animation at Disney's Hollywood Studios.
Gallery
Trivia
- Kevin can apparently swallow and vomit Carl's walking stick without damaging her throat.
- Even though Kevin is a female, she shares many traits with male birds (besides "Kevin" being a traditional masculine name for both humans and animals).
- Her appearance is based on the male Himalayan Monal pheasant.
- She is a large ratite bird, the family that includes ostriches, emus and rheas, and in all of those species, the fathers help raise the chicks, in the case of the South American rhea, the male takes on full responsibility of his chicks.
- And also, only the male birds of paradise are colorful like Peafowls.
- Because of the fact that Kevin is abnormally large, she might be one of a species of large prehistoric birds. Her possible species could be a Phorusrhacos or Kelenken (an even larger cousin of Phorusrhacos), commonly referred to as "Terror Birds". However, both are carnivores, unlike Kevin, who seems to be an omnivore or vegetarian.
- Her body structure also resembles an extinct species of bird called the Moa.
- In one draft the reason Charles Muntz was after Kevin was because her eggs had the power to restore youth, this was scrapped because Muntz wasn't concerned about his age and this is beyond believable.
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