Up

[MacGuffin]

Super Bowl ad:

[MacGuffin]

Up director Pete Docter reveals the method behind Pixar's magic
Source: SciFi Wire

Pete Docter, director of Disney/Pixar's new animated movie Up, and producer Jonas Rivera told reporters in New York and Burbank, Calif., that the movie mixes tragedy and comedy, talking dogs and floating houses in an effort to touch the heart.

Docter and Rivera screened the first 46 minutes of the movie to audiences at New York Comic Con and at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif., this week, and SCI FI Wire was there.

Up tells the story of 78 year-old Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), who in his golden years sets out on the adventure of a lifetime by tying thousands of helium balloons to his house. The only problem is that Carl gains an unexpected traveling partner in 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai), whom he finds on his porch. Together they embark on a journey to remote South America in a quest to find the legendary Paradise Falls.

The following is an edited Q&A that combines interviews with Docter and Rivera in New York over the weekend with comments the duo made in Burbank on Tuesday. Up opens May 29. (Massive spoilers ahead!)

How did you come up with the odd concept for Up?

Docter: It started with the idea of escaping and getting away from everything. [Co-director and screenwriter] Bob Peterson and I got together and started thinking about that and came up with the image of a house floating in the sky with balloons. We both thought, "Wow, that's really intriguing." Something about it encapsulated the idea of escape. We also wanted to do something with an old man. There's been a lot of great humor possibilities that we've explored with a grouchy old guy. So then we thought about how the old guy would get into the floating house, and that thought experiment led to the house. ...

The movie starts out almost tragically and then sort of changes tone. Can you talk about managing that?

Docter: Well that was important because, two reasons. One, we get to such a kind of a wacky place that I felt like we need a real foundation of emotion. ... My favorite films have this great balance of both. ... Walt Disney talks about "for every laugh there should be a tear" kind of a thing. And a guy [who] was a great mentor of mine, Joe Grant, who worked right here with Walt Disney back in the days of Dumbo and Sleeping Beauty and was working up till he's 97, had always phrased it: "What are you giving the audience to take home?"

And I think that's, for me, the things I take home. Yeah, the jokes are funny, but they kind of go out of your head. It's really the emotional stuff that you carry around with you for the days and weeks and sometimes even years after you see the film. And so we wanted to plant it that way. It was also important just to really care about why is it so important for this guy to get the house to the falls. You needed some weight of ... something you really cared about, and so we worked really hard to make that backstory something that was meaningful to Carl, and therefore the audience.

What do you think the audience will take home?

Docter: ... It's in the setup and in the payoff at the end of the film. ... Carl worries that he missed this adventure. When we think of adventure, we think of exotic travel and wild places and meeting people and stuff. ... And what he realizes is that he actually had the greatest adventure, which was the wonderful life he had with his wife. And I think, for me, that's the thing. ... Most of the time, when I think back on great events, I remember, it's these small little moments: ... being with my kids having hot chocolate or cleaning out the basement with my wife and just get to laughing. ... Little moments like that. And that's what we tried to portray in the montage. ...

What does the 3-D add to the film?

Docter: ... I think it adds a sort of a depth. ... One thing that was important to me is to not distract you from the story. ... Some films [revel] in the 3-D and they do a lot of ooga-booga [pokes his hand forward], you know, reaching out. ... For this type of film, we're trying very hard to make it ... subtle. ... It adds to the richness, to the depth of the environments. ... You walk through the jungle, and you can see all of these layers going back. And the space when you set foot on the edge of that cliff along with Carl, and he sees Paradise Falls, it adds a real richness there.

Rivera: I think the flying as well. They go up in the sky, and looking through the clouds and things, and that's one of the things we've done, and the way we're treating 3-D is treating the screen as a window, looking in, as opposed to breaking things out into the theater. So it's sort of treating it like theater, where you're looking through at the stage almost, and it really gives it a nice warmth of depth. ...

Where did the idea for talking dogs come from?

Docter: We do this all the time. You're sitting around the table, and you just make up lines for them. Like, "What are they thinking right now?" "Are you going to eat that?" kind of stuff. And so we just thought, "Well, what if you really play that through, and instead of [anthropomorphizing] them, as most cartoons do, what if we stayed true to what a dog is thinking—at least what we think they're thinking—and ... we came up with the collar idea. ...

It seemed like an approach that hadn't really been covered before. And an opportunity for humor. A lot of the stuff we're trying for in this film is humor in true. Like, it's not necessarily big slapstick gags, but it's like little moments that you recognize as real, and hopefully that kind of falls into that category, as wacky as it is, that you kind of feel, "Oh, yeah, that's what a dog would say." ...

Has there been any breakthrough in technical achievements with Up? Monsters, Inc. achieved fur, and Finding Nemo did water. Does Up raise the bar in any way?

Docter: The big one that comes to mind is the sense of caricature. It may not seem like a technical thing, but given Carl's weird proportions, ... he's such an odd bird, and we were looking for a simplicity, so it was a hard thing to figure out. We have great technical directors that model everything, and they really think about physics. They are pulling a lot of simulations based on how cloth falls or how balloons move, and we came in and said, "That's great, but what I want is caricature. How do we turn this up or simplify the cloth behavior?" They had to go back and figure that out. How do you capture, using a computer, the things that people draw?

Rivera: It's the only time I've seen the technical directors stumped. ...

Docter: Yeah, we made them cry. (laughs)

Carl and Russell alone could have been really annoying, but together they balance one another out perfectly. Was it hard to find that place of equilibrium?

Docter: To me that's what makes film or theater work, when two characters spark off one another. We found that almost by accident with Buzz and Woody on Toy Story. With Monsters, we initially just had Sully and the little girl. It wasn't until we had a suggestion to add a friend, Mike, that Sully started to develop. For Up, it was a little tricky to find what it was about this little kid that would push this old guy's buttons. It was his tenacity for sure; Russell won't take no for an answer. No many how many times Carl slams the door on his face, ding-dong, the kid keeps coming back.

[MacGuffin]

[Ravi]

This comes out on my birthday!

[picolas]

me too!

..and Bob Hope's.

[RegularKarate]

Wow... the 3D trailer showed in front of Coraline... this looks great in 3D

[MacGuffin]

Up director Pete Docter on talking dogs, youth scouts and adventure

Pete Docter, director of Disney/Pixar's next animated movie Up, and producer Jonas Rivera screened 17 minutes of footage from the 3-D movie at WonderCon over the weekend and revealed the creative process behind the unusual movie in an exclusive interview with SCI FI Wire.

Up tells the story of 78 year-old Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), who in his golden years sets out on the adventure of a lifetime by tying thousands of helium balloons to his house. The only problem is that Carl gains an unexpected traveling partner in 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai), whom he finds on his porch. Together they embark on a journey to remote South America in a quest to find the legendary Paradise Falls. Up opens May 29.

The footage screened included part of what we viewed earlier, including Carl's first meeting with Russell; Carl's house ascending; Carl and Russell's first encounters with the giant bird, Kevin; and Carl and Russell's befriending Dug (not Doug, we're told), the talking dog.

Following is an edited version of our exclusive interview with Docter and Rivera. There may be spoilers ahead!

Where are you guys are at in the process of making this film?

Docter: We're close to being done. We're five weeks away from being completely done with the film. We have 15 more minutes of music to record, We're going up to Skywalker Ranch to do the sound next week. ... There's a handful of shots left to light. So we're very close.

Rivera: Yeah, and it's post production.

The score is by Michael Giacchino?

Rivera: He's fantastic. I can't wait for people to hear the score. It's wonderful. ...

This is an unusual idea to say the least.

Docter: It is, and it's been one of the challenges just kind of telling people what this movie is, but it's comedy and adventure built on a sort of bedrock of emotion. ... One of the things that's really important to me in everything that I've worked on is finding some relatable thing that the audience can identify with, ... that they understand is true for them in their own life. And in this film, we were talking about it a minute ago, this idea that you get swept up in the hustle bustle of every day, and you have to fly here and na na na, and ... it's only once in a while you sort of wake up and go, "Wow, the time I have with my family and friends is really a precious thing, and it fades. It goes away." People grow up, they move away, they die, you know? ...

I think the first time we showed it to Jonas, he gave a great compliment. He just said, "I want to go home and be with my kids and be with my wife." And if you can kind of wake people up a little bit and just for 15 minutes make them appreciate all of the great things that they have, that's what this movie is about. ...

This feels to me like a kind of movie we haven't seen for a long time, which is the adventure movie, which they used to make a lot of and they don't anymore. And you even have sort of a retro feel to some of this, like the Explorers Club ...

Docter: Yeah, exactly. ... We came up with this idea of a floating house, and we worked backwards from that, thinking, "How did this guy get into the floating house?" And we came up with this whole backstory of him meeting this girl, and they fell in love, and they had this whole relationship. And this failed promise, that they didn't ever get to go down to South America to live this adventure that they always wanted to do. And so it was kind of based on that.

But that led us to this montage kind of feel, almost like a Capra film, reaching back to the '30s, because that's where the film takes place when we start out. And we wanted to infuse that through the rest of the film. To make kind of an homage to those films that we grew up with that we loved: ... Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, as well as ... Wizard of Oz and the Capra films ...

Rivera: It's a Wonderful Life.

Docter: Yeah, exactly. So ... it was a definite conscious choice to try to incorporate elements of those.

You also have this antic stuff: Kevin the bird and the talking dogs, which capture the essence of dogness.

Rivera: That's the goal, that's good.

Docter: Yeah. I mean, there've been a lot of talking-dog movies, but I don't think anybody's really approached it this way, which is to think as much as we could about, like, what would a real dog [say?] What's important to a real dog? "Squirrel!" You know, it's those things of, food and ...

Rivera: They cannot lie.

Docter: That's right. Yeah. ...

In part it was based on this idea, what I was talking about earlier, the fantastic adventure that Carl thinks his wife really wanted, this adventure of going to the ends of the Earth and seeing rare, exotic creatures that no one's ever seen before and doing these amazing things. And, of course, he realizes that what she really wanted and what she had, and what he had as well, is this most incredible adventure of all, which is the relationship that the two of them had. And so it was kind of working backwards from that punchline that led us to these other characters and tried to weave them in in a way that supports that theme.

You based Russell on one of the animators at Pixar?

Docter: Yeah. ... Pete Sohn. He's just such an entertaining guy that we thought, "OK, when you're looking to create memorable characters, ... if you can climb a couple stairs on your way up by basing it on someone that you know or whatever, that's a great head start. And he's definitely a character.

And Jordan Nagai, who voices Russell, was only 7 when he did the role?

Rivera: Yeah, we were actually worried about that, that his voice might change.

Was it hard for a kid to focus for however many takes?

Docter: It's tricky.

Rivera: It took a lot of sessions. ... And credit our editor, you know. Because he's not an actor. That was one of the things that was important about Jordan, casting him. We listened to over 400 kids, a country-wide casting call, and we found, it's pretty obvious, though it took us 400 kids to get through, that kids that were actors weren't, didn't feel right. They were too good, almost too polished. And this was just a regular kid. We just wanted that regular kid. But often, you said, reminded you of a kid growing up, we hope we hear that a lot, because we really want it to feel that way.

[hedwig]

goddamn, i get choked up just reading these fucking interviews. how do they do that?

i want this movie NOW.

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[Gold Trumpet]

Alright, now I'm excited. The other trailers were too vague but now we have some shape of the film to go off of. Pixar's imagination seems endless (with exception to Cars and the bad idea that it deserved a sequel), but I'm not complaining.

[samsong]

so beautiful.

[Redlum]

Joyous news, the UK will be the second to last country to receive this film when it hits screens in October. That's right, moths after even Venezuela and Estonia. Once again shoddy distribution will drive me to piracy.

That new trailer is damn good.

[MacGuffin]

Pixar's 'Up' to open Cannes fest
Film is first 3-D toon ever to kick off the event
Source: Variety

PARIS -- Ed Asner isn't exactly the first celebrity you'd think of to demand the spotlight on the Cannes Film Festival's typically star-studded red carpet. But organizers are changing things up this year, choosing Disney and Pixar's "Up" as the event's opening-night pic.

"Up" will be the first toon, as well as 3-D title, to open Cannes since the festival was founded 62 years ago. It will screen out of competition.

The Mouse House is happy to use Cannes as a way to hype "Up," about a 78-year-old man (Asner) who embarks on a series of adventures after tying thousands of balloons to his house and flying off to South America.

Other animated films have played Cannes in the past, with DreamWorks Animation presenting "Kung Fu Panda," "Over the Hedge," "Shrek" and "Shrek 2" there in previous years. Toon contenders for the Palme d'Or have also included "The Triplets of Belleville," docu "Waltz With Bashir" and "Persepolis." Disney's "Dumbo" screened at Cannes in 1947.

Organizers were attracted to "Up" because the toon enables them to tap into Hollywood's push to release more 3-D animated features in theaters.

"Cannes has demonstrated for many years its interest in animation by selecting films from DreamWorks, as well as films that use animation differently," said Thierry Fremaux, the fest's director. "It's audacious to open the festival with an animated film, but we're conscious of our duty: By stretching its boundaries, cinema remains universal."

"Up" is the 10th film from Disney and Pixar. Pic is co-directed by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.").

Studio has been looking for more ways to promote its critically lauded animated pics after execs including toon topper John Lasseter have grown increasingly frustrated at the recent B.O. performance of releases like "Bolt." While the toons wound up doing well, execs feel they could have performed better with bigger pushes.

DreamWorks Animation's Jeffrey Katzenberg has long felt that a major presence at Cannes can serve as a lucrative launching pad for films, generating considerable mileage from media coverage by premiering pics there. While at Disney, he took "Beauty and the Beast" to Cannes, making it the first animated pic in many years to play at the festival.

Last year, for "Kung Fu Panda," Katzenberg paraded Angelina Jolie and Jack Black, who voiced the lead characters in the pic. In other years, he made sure "Shrek" stars Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy were on hand. Studio's also produced stunts for "Shark Tale" and "Bee Movie," for which it stuffed Jerry Seinfeld in a bee suit and dangled him over the side of a building.

The voice cast for "Up" is not as high profile. Lead voices are provided by 80-year-old Asner, Christopher Plummer, John Ratzenberger, Delroy Lindo and Jordan Nagai.

Katzenberg is also the biggest cheerleader for 3-D animated films, with his "Monsters vs. Aliens" bowing later this month, so it's a bit ironic that his biggest rival in the toon space has landed such a prime berth to show off the technology at Cannes. To be fair, Disney already has released more 3-D toons and boasts an upcoming slate packed with them over the next several years.

"It's a great honor for the Walt Disney Studios, and our incredibly talented cast members at Pixar Animation Studios, to have 'Up' selected as the first animated feature to ever open the Cannes Film Festival," said Disney chairman Dick Cook. "We are so proud of this terrific movie and can't wait to share it with the filmmaking community and festivalgoers."

Lasseter said, "This is a huge step for animation and further supports our belief that a great animated film is simply a great film."

Cannes runs May 13-24, with "Up" screening on opening day. Toon opens in the U.S. on May 29.

[MacGuffin]

'Up' is Pixar at its most ambitious
The film began with an image of a grouchy man holding balloons. A story developed out of that -- slowly. More than four years later, it's ready.
By John Horn; Los Angeles Times

The 100 or so Pixar Animation Studios employees had good reason to be giddy, and you could understand why they were more than a little nervous too. For more than four years, the animators, sound designers, editors and artists from every other Pixar department had plugged away on "Up" and on an early morning in April, they were finally about to see how their animated movie had turned out.

The movie itself -- Pixar's 10th animated film -- is narratively ambitious, a story about a 78-year-old widower's highly unusual road trip with a chubby young boy that, throughout its making, teetered on becoming sentimental and episodic. Although the movie is filled with comic bits, "Up" also features scenes of complex human emotion -- including the grief of a miscarriage -- that are rarely explored in family films. Parent studio Disney really needed the film to work commercially too: In earnings released last week, Disney's profit fell 46%, largely because of underperforming movies such as "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and " Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience."

To add one more level of pressure to the Pixar team, just a few days before that April screening at George Lucas' bucolic Skywalker Ranch, the Cannes Film Festival had selected "Up" to launch this week's prestigious festival, a first for an animated film.

If producer Jonas Rivera and writer-director Pete Docter, two of Pixar's earliest employees, were sweating bullets when they introduced "Up" to their Pixar colleagues, they didn't show it. "This is the first time that we've got everything together," Rivera said. Added Docter just before the house lights dimmed: "Thank you guys for making the movie."

Despite all the end-of-the-journey gratitude, "Up," which premieres in Cannes on Wednesday and arrives in theaters May 29, wasn't quite finished.

As soon as the screening ended, Docter, Rivera, composer Michael Giacchino, executive producer John Lasseter and a dozen members of Pixar's brain trust met over lunch in a Skywalker conference room to discuss what they had just seen. By the time the team finished dessert, they had decided "Up" needed a new piece of music, and the choice they made with Giacchino revealed much about the film's creative ambitions.

As "Up's" poster and trailer make clear, the film's central image is a house, tethered to thousands of balloons, soaring into the sky. When septuagenarian Carl Fredricksen's ( Ed Asner) residence took flight at the Skywalker screening, Giacchino's score was big and dramatic, the kind of music that typically accompanies an action sequence.

"What we had I think works," said Docter. "But I didn't feel like we were quite capturing it." Specifically, the music wasn't magical, poetic. The house's taking off needed to play more like a mystical metaphor -- Fredricksen's trying somehow to join his late wife, Ellie, in the heavens -- and less like a prison break.

"There's something about the lyricism of the floating house that appealed to me from Day One," said Docter, a tall man whose 10-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, provided young Ellie's voice. With a new piece of music, the scene played closer to how he always imagined it should. "Now, it's almost like he's waltzing with Ellie as the house takes off."

Getting personal

"Up" represents several Pixar firsts. In addition to the studio's first trip to Cannes, "Up" also marks a new move into producing and releasing a film in 3-D. It's a format that has worked well for competitor DreamWorks Animation's "Monsters vs. Aliens," and Pixar is now remaking its first two "Toy Story" films (in addition to next year's "Toy Story 3") in the immersive technology.

The film's more material departures are harder to detect. It's the first Pixar feature to have as its central character a senior citizen, and because Fredricksen is based on friends and relatives of the filmmakers, "Up" might well be considered the studio's most personal film. "I think so too," said Bob Peterson, "Up's" co-director and co-writer, who also lends his voice to one of the film's dogs. "It's an hommage to our grandparents, and that makes it personal."

Before "Up" became a movie, it was just a single image: a grouchy old man with balloons. The 40-year-old Docter, who has a writing credit on last year's Oscar-winning "Wall-E" but hasn't directed a movie since 2001's "Monsters, Inc.," then added another element: What if those balloons raised the man's house into the skies?

As visually striking as the image might be, it wasn't clear how it and the senior citizen inside the floating house fit into a larger story, which explains why "Up" took so long to make it to the screen.

"In the very first draft . . . he just wanted to join his wife up in the sky," Docter said. "It was almost a kind of strange suicide mission or something. And obviously that's [a problem]. Once he gets airborne, then what? So we had to have some goal for him to achieve that he had not yet gotten."

Added Peterson: "Originally, he was not going anywhere. He was just going into the sky, because he had always associated his wife with birds."

That didn't sound like a Pixar movie -- it sounded like a film out of the surrealism movement. So Docter, Peter- son and Rivera tried to figure out what they were really trying to communicate in their movie. "We hadn't flushed it out. We didn't really know what was going to happen or who he was going to meet," Rivera said. "But what we knew was why he was doing it -- the desire to get away."

As the story took shape, it became clear that Fredricksen felt not only a little angry but also unfulfilled. He had enjoyed a long romance with his wife, but they hadn't been able to have kids (touched on in an emotional, dialogue-free, four-minute montage of their lives), and their dreams of traveling to the distant land of Paradise Falls had died when she did. But those were episodes, not narrative. "Up" needed something more.

So now real estate developers are encroaching on Fredricksen's last remaining patch of comfort, his home, and a pesky 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer named Russell (voiced by newcomer Jordan Nagai) was knocking on his door, trying to collect a help-a-senior-citizen merit badge.

Taking flight, in other words, wouldn't be such a bad idea. But even if he (along with Russell, who happened to be on Fredricksen's porch at liftoff) was finally able to get to Paradise Falls, was that it? What would they find there?

When Russell and Fredricksen land in Paradise Falls, they encounter Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), a once-famous explorer Fredricksen and his wife had idolized. The exotic land is populated with strange birds and talking dogs, but the real surprise is Muntz, who has gone the way of Col. Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness" and becomes "Up's" villain.

"A guy ties thousands of balloons to his house and floats away to South America to go to Paradise Falls," Rivera said. "That's what happens, those are the plot points," Rivera said. "But that's not what it's about. What is it about? It's about adventure, it's about life."

Elderly influences

To solve that question -- What are the most important things in life? -- the "Up" filmmaking team turned to their oldest acquaintances and relatives, mining their memories for stories. The influences included the legendary Disney animator Joe Grant (who died in 2005) and Disney costume designer Alice Davis.

What the filmmakers decided was that the most meaningful trips didn't have to be in a balloon-propelled dwelling. They could be picnics in the park, watching clouds drift by, visits to an ice cream store.

"He's always thought of adventure as travel and exotic places and animals no one has ever seen," Docter said of Fredricksen. "And in the end he comes around to realize that the real adventures in life are the small things that we do with our family and friends."

"Up," for all of its novelty, was returning to some of the same simple, universal ideas that anchor all Pixar movies. Strip away the elaborate (if sometimes unconventional) narrative devices, and you begin to see relatable truths that give the movies heart. Wall-E just wants to hold hands. "Ratatouille" is about becoming the person you were born to be. The importance of family? Watch "Finding Nemo."

What "Up" was trying to say, in other words, was not so different from what has happened to Pixar itself: that growing older can be a beautiful thing.

[Redlum]

The Pixar Team at Cannes on Twitter!
http://twitter.com/UP_dates

I've been watching the updates come in all morning. Man, these guys are busy.