Up
Short description
Up centres on Carl Fredricksen, a retired balloon salesman who has spent his life dreaming of travel and adventure but kept postponing both. Now 78 and widowed, he faces pressure to leave the house he shared with his wife, so he takes an unusual step: he ties thousands of balloons to the building and floats away, aiming for the South American wilderness and the waterfall the couple once hoped to see. Only after take-off does he discover he has an unwanted passenger, Russell, an eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer who was on the porch at the wrong moment. Their journey brings encounters with a talking dog and a large flightless bird, and the pair end up relying on each other.
Pixar produced the film, which Pete Docter directed from a screenplay he wrote with Bob Peterson and Jonas Rivera produced. It was Docter's third directorial credit, following Monsters, Inc. and the short Mike's New Car, and it precedes Inside Out and Soul. Ed Asner voices Carl, with Jordan Nagai as Russell, Christopher Plummer as Charles Muntz, and Bob Peterson as Dug and Alpha.
Released in 2009, Up runs 96 minutes and cost about 175 million dollars, returning roughly 735 million worldwide, a strong result for an original animated story. On IMDb it holds 8.3 from 1.2 million votes and on TMDB 8 from about 22,000, while a critics' rating of 9.1 from 291 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Even as a boy, Carl watches a television report about Mantz's departure, at a time when the man was already an adult. At the time of the film, Carl is 78 years old, which means that the age of his idol Charles Mantz is over 100 years old.
- Arthur Conan Doyle's novel 'The Lost World' describes adventures on one of the tepuis. Carl also aspired to reach one of them – Roraima, and Mantz's story echoes the story of Professor Challenger – one of the heroes of that work.
- As Fredriksen flew by, a teddy bear from the movie 'Toy Story 3' (2010) was visible in the girl's window, lying near the bed.
- Mantz shows a bird skeleton on the same stage where Presto performed.
- World-renowned French chanson singer Charles Aznavour voiced (in the French dub) a character named Carl.
- The face and character of the main character were "based on" the famous Hollywood actors Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau.
- A game of the same name was based on this movie.
- In the trailer for the cartoon, Carl Fredricksen stuck his tongue out from the window at the nursing home workers. This moment was changed in the cartoon itself.
- When the house first takes off, the porch is completely empty, and therefore it's unclear how Russell got there.
- In 2005, Colby Curtin, a 10-year-old girl, was diagnosed with vascular cancer. Already dying, the girl saw a commercial for the animated film “Up” from Pixar and couldn’t wait for it to be released. However, by that time, Colby was too weak to be taken to the cinema—she was in the hospital, but most of all she dreamed of watching “Up.” The family’s friends told Pixar about the dying girl’s wish. A studio representative flew to California and brought a DVD of the film, which had not yet been released. The animation studio gave Colby a special disc with the cartoon, which was just about to be released. Approximately seven hours after watching the film, the girl died.
- In the animated series "The Simpsons" in the episode "Coming to Homerica" (2009), when Carl and Lenny fly on a chair with balloons, Carl Fredricksen's house flies by in the background.
- The hosts of the TV show 'MythBusters' (2003) explored the possibility of human flight using a cluster of helium-filled balloons in one episode. Their results showed that it would take over 3,500 balloons to lift a child weighing about 35 kg.
- When Carl flies over one of the streets of his city, you can notice the Planet Pizza truck.
- The main villain is named Charles Mintz. This was the name of the producer who stole the rights to Walt Disney's popular cartoon series in 1928.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
