Up Review

With the dialogue-free first act of WALL-E, Pixar challenged the assumptions underlying family animated movies. The little robot's courtship of EVE had the physical aplomb of a silent movie, each character constructed out of the minimum of elements required to make us love them. The achievement was recognised with an Oscar for Best Animation. With Up, Pixar and Disney continue their adventure in pared-back storytelling, repudiating the pernicious received wisdom that what children require from a film is the discharge from a blunderbuss of pop culture gags, demographically-engineered characters, infantile wisecracks and celebrity voices.

Excess is a sign of anxiety, of uncertainty about what works. The mission to strip out superfluity begins with the opening short film, Partly Cloudy. Where do babies come from? A stork delivers them in a bundle. Every child knows that. Walt Disney used this parental euphemism for the opening of Dumbo. Here the Pixar-Disney team build around the premise, with clouds creating life and then handing it over to the weary storks to deliver. Not a word is spoken. These shorts are proving grounds for the studio's upcoming talent: the remit is to return feature film animation to its roots, as a universal form of storytelling, reclaiming it from the sassy motormouth of the Shrek era.

Up begins with a downer. A quiet boy called Carl is befriended by tomboy Ellie. "You don't say much," she notices, tellingly. Carl and Ellie are in thrall to the daring explorer Charles Muntz, whose adventures in the lost isle of Paradise Falls are captured in black-and-white Movietone reels. Carl and Ellie pledge to go on adventures of their own. But love gets in the way. They get married. They do up their house and decorate the nursery. Then in one heartbreaking moment, we realise they can't have children. The film is presented in 3-D, which requires the audience to wear special glasses. They don't work very well when your eyes are full of tears. Carl and Ellie grow old together, and then she dies.

Carl is left alone in their house, surrounded by a building site. A developer wants him to move. He refuses but then his anger gets the better of him. On the day they show up to take Carl away, he unfurls thousands of balloons, and he and his house float up, up and away. But he has a stowaway. A tubby boy scout called Russell. The adventure of this odd couple begins.