Pixar’s Finding Nemo is easily the darkest of the films.

Marlin, a clownfish, starts off promising his wife, Coral, the whole ocean:

Marlin: So, Coral, when you said you wanted an ocean view, you didn’t think you were going to get the whole ocean, did you? Huh?
Marlin: Oh, yeah. A fish can breathe out here. Did your man deliver, or did he deliver?
Coral: My man delivered.
Marlin: And it wasn’t so easy.
Coral: Because a lot of other clownfish had their eyes on this place.

Like many couples in love, they name their future children, without considering that life sometimes has other plans. Pixar treats these middle class dreams seriously, though, and that’s what makes the next scene all the more tragic. The very dream of giving his future children the gift of an inexhaustible horizon cuts short Coral’s life and that of most of his children when a barracuda eats them. (more…)

A young scout yearns to help an elderly widower in order to earn a merit badge.  A senior citizen unfurls hard-learned life lessons for the world.  Disney/Pixar’s Up is a lofty film that thrives off old fashioned values, and it is your new number-one 2009 summer blockbuster.  Complete with newsreel footage only a great grand-dad could recall, Up is a film which cherishes that very dated, old fashioned concept – great storytelling.  

In an age where Dreamworks’ feeds us a steady diet of kung-fu pandas and boogie-in-your-butt lemurs voiced by the guy that gave us Borat, three-to-thirteen year olds have a place to fill up on some traditional values – Disney/Pixar.  

My wife and I took our 6-year old boy to see Up on Saturday to a packed movie theater in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  All we heard in the theater was laughing, deep emotion and applause. And why not?  Up is film that, had it been produced with live actors decades ago, may have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.  It is classic American storytelling – true love, big dreams, self-reliance and fierce determination. It doesn’t need gimmicks, politically correct characters or audience focus-group testing to determine its destination.  It relies on Russell, who misses his Dad, and Carl Fredricksen, a lost old curmudgeon grieving over the death of his wife – they get us where we’re going.  You know them – they’re the sort of folks we see and meet most everyday.   (more…)