Noncomped Journal
products
Why the Up (2009) — Pixar DVD Holds Up
Pixar's Up earns its emotional reputation without manipulation — the opening montage alone does more storytelling work than most features manage in two hours. A durable physical copy worth owning.
There's a version of Up that gets discussed almost entirely through its first twenty minutes — the Carl-and-Ellie montage — as though the rest of the film is a footnote. That framing does the movie a disservice, but it also points to something real: Pixar made a film whose most technically ambitious sequence happens before the title card appears.
What Docter and co-director Bob Peterson built around that opening is a road movie in the oldest sense. Two mismatched travelers, an impossible vehicle, a destination that turns out to mean something different than either of them expected. The balloon-lifted house is a visual gag that somehow never stops being a visual gag while also functioning as a symbol that earns its weight by the final act. That's a difficult balance to maintain across ninety-six minutes.
The film surfaces regularly in conversations about animated movies that work for adults — a category that tends to get treated as a novelty rather than a standard. Up isn't trying to be adult in the sense of dark or ironic. It's adult in the sense that it takes grief seriously as a subject and doesn't resolve it with a tidy lesson. Carl doesn't stop missing Ellie. He just finds a reason to keep moving.
From a craft standpoint, Giacchino's score deserves more attention than it typically receives in these conversations. The main theme — a simple, waltz-adjacent melody — gets developed and recontextualized throughout the film in ways that track Carl's emotional state without announcing it. It's the kind of score that works best when you're not consciously listening to it.
For anyone building a physical collection of films worth keeping — the kind of shelf that survives a decade of moving apartments and changing streaming services — Up belongs on it. The DVD edition available on Amazon sits under ten dollars, which is about as low a barrier as you'll find for a film this durable. If picture quality is the priority, step up to Blu-ray. But either way, own it rather than rent it.