I do still have one major bone to pick with Fenzel, and since this is an argument on the internet, there are certain protocols that must be observed. Therefore, I will start by rephrasing his argument in the most overstated and reductive way that I possibly can, to that it’s easier for me to find fault with it. As I understand it, Fenzel’s post boils down to this: Up is valuable because it addresses a central part of our life experience that is largely ignored by Hollywood: the question of how we should live once we’ve moved past the teleological process of “growing up.” He adds almost as an afterthought that in some cases people simply graft themselves onto the narrative of their children’s adolescence… but this, to me, is strange, because it’s a rather crucial detail. The question is not really “how should I live,” but rather “how should I live in the absence of children?” Now, maybe this is still one of the hard questions, but the film provides the easiest possible answer: it simply rejects the questions premises, claiming that any life without children is hollow.
Bold claims! Can I back this up? I dunno, but I sure did spend about a thousand words trying. And if you’re interested, you can read them! It’s like we were made for eachother. You complete me, internet. You.. complete… me.
The film opens with Carl as a child, thinking as a child. He meets Ellie in an abandoned, ramshackle, and empty house, which they imagine is an airship. We then skip forward in time to the pair as young newlyweds. Crucially, the first thing they do as a couple is buy the old abandoned house and fix it up, not so much putting aside childish things as literally transforming them into that most adult of things, a household. (And presumably a mortgage? I’m a little unclear on their finances.) And then they start thinking of children. It’s all part of the process, after all… first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes –
Then comes infertility, throwing a wrench into the gears. Ellie takes it harder than Carl, leaving him with the task of figuring out how to fix the situation. Most people would probably say something like “It’s okay, honey. So we can’t have kids of our own… we can always adopt.” Carl attacks the problem from a different angle. “It’s okay, honey. So we can’t have kids of our own… we can always regress.” The room that was to be their nursery becomes instead a shrine to the globe-trotting adventure they had dreamed of as children. That this should be seen as a regression is made explicitly clear by the central role of Ellie’s childish drawing of Paradise falls, and by the fact that they keep their trip fund in a piggy bank instead of a savings account. Upon Ellie’s death, Carl regresses further, pranking his enemies and refusing to deal with his problems. (The moment when he hits the construction worker and then runs into his house to hide rather than helping the man up and apologizing is telling.) Traveling to Paradise Falls is perhaps the ultimate regression, acting out a childish fantasy (running off to live in South America) in a childish fashion (house lifted by balloons). And isn’t it interesting that the house regresses right along with him? Over the course of the trip, it becomes progressively more damaged, until, at the end, it is broken down, empty, and abandoned just like it was at the beginning. What ends up sitting atop Paradise Falls is not the home Carl and Ellie built together, but the clubhouse they played in as children. And along with their clubhouse, Carl encounters another fixture of his childhood dreams: the explorer Charles Muntz.
Muntz isn’t actually much like Satan: he doesn’t tempt, at least not actively, and he doesn’t seem interested in being in charge. Rather, he is – among other things – a metonymy for those same childish dreams. Up close, being a globe trotting explorer turns out to be kind of creepy and lonely, with vaguely imperialist and explicitly anti-environmental undertones. There’s a certain amount of truth to this: a LOT of our childhood dreams are kind of messed up when you think of them hard enough. (Do kids still play Cowboys and Indians?) But the film hits it really, really hard. Particularly cartoonish is the row of trophies – goggles and helmets – that Muntz has collected from other would be explorers that he’s murdered over the years. That’s right – not only are your childhood dreams of adventure unachievable, they are lying in wait to kill you should you ever try.
The precise nature of the adventure doesn’t matter: in this case it’s wilderness exploration, but it could have been piracy on the high seas, or winning the international pie-eating championship, or pretty much anything else that involves actually going to exotic places and doing something exciting. Call this kind of activity extrinsic adventure, and know that Up considers it juvenile. In the badge pinning ceremony at the end, the other two kids are both up there for something absurdly badass… I don’t remember exactly what, but they’re getting their badges in cage fighting and enhanced interrogation techniques or something like that. And then there’s Russell standing up there getting his badge for assisting the elderly, and the implication is that he’s the only one who had a real adventure.
Russell’s adventure (which is presented as mature, and, in that it’s essentially about an emotional journey, intrinsic) could be seen as the act of helping another person. And I think this is what Fenzel is trying to say. But I see the name of the badge as a red herring, because by the end Carl can hardly be seen as some elderly person in need of assistance: he’s OBVIOUSLY Russell’s father figure. (Maybe they could have hit this point harder, but it would have required special equipment.) The only adventure worth having is not helping the elderly, but rather recreating the nuclear family unit. This is as true for Carl as it is for Russell: finally getting to Paradise Falls is an anticlimax, becoming a responsible father-figure is a happy ending. The pattern even works for Muntz, who can be seen as the Carl-that-might-have-been. (Note that the awesome sword-cane duel paints them as equal in decrepitude despite the fact that Muntz is easily thirty years older. Plus his first name is Charles, which is too close for coincidence.) If Carl Fredricksen hadn’t gotten sidetracked by that whole marriage thing, he too could have become a famous explorer… and wound up lonely, bitter, forgotten by the world, and spending his days talking to animals. Unless you buy into the film’s value system, it’s hard to understand why Muntz is a figure of pity. By any rational standard, he should be lauded as one of the great scientific minds of his era – as Russell points out, “It’s a talking dog!” – but we’re told in no uncertain terms that this too is a pale substitute for taking your kid to bingo night. And why is Muntz a villain? All he wants to do is capture a bird! He doesn’t even want to kill the thing, he just wants to tranq it and put it in a zoo. Why is that so bad? Because Muntz has bucked the system: he followed his dream of [anything other than child rearing]. This makes him bad. The fact that his dream involves splitting up another family unit, even an animal one? That makes him evil.
Some of you might be wondering why I’m characterizing this value structure (nuclear family good, following your dreams bad) is an easy answer. Wouldn’t the easy answer be “do whatever you want, whenever you want?” But I have an axiomatic law for situations like this, which is “Disney’s Hook does not present us with profound moral truths.” It Maybe the word I’m looking for isn’t “easy” but familiar… either way, it makes it hard to claim that Up fills a crucial gap in the landscape of popular entertainment: it’s basically the same Spielbergian Idiot-Manchild-Learns-How-To-Be-A-Daddy plot that motivates, like, %60-%70 of all modern cinema, from Big Daddy to Ghostbusters 2 to Schindler’s List. You’ve seen this plot before, but I’ll give you a quick rundown:
Step 1 (optional): Man is totally focused on something “serious,” like his career.
This could be from, like, ten different Jim Carrey movies, but it's actually from Liar Liar.
Step 2: Man is in a state of childish regression, expressed by hedonism, wackyness, or outright childishness.
You thought I was kidding about Schindler's List, right?
Step 3: Father realizes that while work is too cold, and infantile hedonism is too hot, being a daddy is juuuuust right.
Given that acting like an idiot manchild is basically Adam Sandler's job, this image arguably fulfills all three steps at the same time.
There’s one more issue that I’d like to address. If being a parent is the only worthwhile thing that one can do, how does Ellie fit into the story? There are two possible readings. The one that I like – the one that I choose – is that when they were denied children they regressed together, and while in a certain sense they never grew (ha ha) up, they were still able to have a pleasurable and even a meaningful life living for each other and for their shared dreams. This is the surface meaning, certainly, and as I say, I like it: it would be nice for the film presented some kind of positive experience outside of the parental bond, even if it’s presented as somehow lesser, and is still a subset of the nuclear family. But another possibility exists – I don’t like this one, you can definitely read it into the text – which is that Carl was Ellie’s surrogate infant. In this reading, while his childless life had no meaning until he took responsibility for Russel, she found her meaningful maternal role by taking care of him. Here’s the evidence:
1) The relationship montage in the first reel shows her constantly dressing him, but he never dresses her. This isn’t definitive though, since in more general terms, she is always plays the active/leader/seducer role in their relationship, while Carl is the passive/follower/seducee. But then, in Hollywood, women are often presumed to be passive until they become maternal.
2) Carl is infantilized through character/costume design. It’s not so much that his head is the same size as his torso – that kind of comes with the territory of animation – but notice how his hand is the same width as the rest of his arm (like Russel’s, and like a real toddler), while Ellie has a well defined wrist (as do most real adults). You get to see Carl’s wrists later in the movie… but only after he’s accepted his role as Russel’s father-figure, and (literally) rolled up his sleeves and gotten down to business.
Before...
...and after.
3) While Carl still thought that the adventure book needed to be filled with extrinsic adventures, Ellie had already “grown up” enough to fill it with photos of their life together. Her inscription at the back of the book isn’t a love note, it’s an important life lesson, and while people learn things from their romantic partners all the time, it’s not as intrinsic to that kind of relationship as it s to the parent-child relationship.
Like I said, this isn’t the reading I prefer. In fact, I actively dislike it. The idea that a female character can’t be active without being maternal is patently offensive. And I really like Carl and Ellie’s relationship as a ROMANCE, which this reading kind of destroys… but the evidence is there. And this reading fits better with the film’s overriding ideology that “child-rearing = fulfillment.” And it continues the Disney tradition of offing the mother. So while I’m going to ignore this interpretation as much as I can, it’s hard to ignore it completely.