Pixar reaches new heights in the delightful 'Up'

Everything about Up is an up, in the most visceral and poetic ways. Pete Docter's new Pixar animated feature is even fresher, more inventive and inspired than his previous one, Monster Inc.

Up takes its title from the defining act of a rickety widower, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Edward Asner), who attaches thousands of helium balloons to his house and sails it to South America.

He hopes to complete a promise he made to his wife Ellie: traveling to Paradise Falls, trail-blazed by their childhood hero, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), who was unable to convince the exploring establishment that it was the home of a giant prehistoric bird.

The movie isn't only about a dream deferred and then fulfilled. It's also about the need to keep going up in life, whether you're a stubborn old man like Carl or an eager young boy like Russell (Jordan Nagai), the Junior Wilderness Explorer who becomes an accidental stowaway and then a full partner in the South American adventure. To keep going up without losing the warmth and fellow feeling that root one to a place and a community -- that's a difficult balancing act.

But Up pulls it off minute by minute, with one unexpected gag or flight of fancy after another. Because for Docter, as for his characters, it isn't an act; the movie is an expression of how he sees family, life and the world. In opening flashbacks of Carl and Ellie setting up house, the movie may recall the jolliest, least mawkish moments of It's a Wonderful Life, but Up brings new expansiveness into old Hollywood traditions. Carl learns to see some of Ellie in Russell, but he also learns to appreciate Russell for himself: as a good kid whose parents' divorce may be as hard on him as widowhood is on Carl.

Visually, Up is one of the most astonishing of all Pixar creations, precisely because it starts with unassuming elements: a modest gingerbread-like house ascending into the heavens on balloons, a man who shrinks with age into a cube, a rotund Asian boy whose self-worth depends on dozens of scouting badges. Docter and his co-writer and co-director, Bob Petersen, without a hint of self-consciousness, have conceived the whole movie in contrasts. They're not just between round and rectangular images, but also between lines that jut up and send our focus to the heavens and those that spread out on the horizon and direct our vision back to Earth.

The collision or fusion of these shapes turns the twists of the story into sportive lyric poems. The sequence when Carl unfurls the balloons that will send his home aloft remains magical even if you've seen it in trailers or read about it in reviews.

Docter and his collaborators have prepared us for it superbly. First they provide a swift, spot-on, emotional account of Carl's life from his childhood bond with young tomboy Ellie through their marriage to her death; later, a painful legato rendering of how he's lived without her and turned the home that had been her makeshift clubhouse into a shrine.

At the start of Up's story proper, the house stands alone amid skyscrapers; a tycoon would love to buy Carl out. When Carl panics after a truck knocks down the mailbox signed with his and Ellie's decades-old handprints, he reflexively protects it by hitting a worker with his walker. A judge orders him to enter an assisted-living home. We know that Carl presents no danger to anyone else; we want him to escape. His defiance both fills out his character and extends it.

The act of freeing his house from gravity is transcendent. It's a tribute to "the Spirit of Adventure" that first attracted him to Ellie, who had the chutzpah he lacked. And it transports the audience because of its selfless purity of vision, on the part of the character and the filmmakers. The billow balloons brush against the top of the image, beyond the edge of your vision. The house strains against its foundation.

The moment of release is eerily and lightly conveyed, with unexpected shifts of perspective. The sight of the drifting house erases all sense of boundaries from the city's concrete canyons and becomes -- like the whole movie -- an undiluted delight.

In South America, the key image is perfect: the rock formation that dominates the landscape of Paradise Falls is the tepui, or tabletop mountain -- particularly one tepui that's as thin as an index finger pointing to Olympus.

But the characters Carl and Russell meet there are, again, an uncanny mixture of the everyday and the supernal. That 12-foot bird turns out to exist and eat chocolate, and is full of mischief and humor (and is also a great parent); Muntz is alive and has outfitted a pack of dogs with devices that read and speak their thoughts. One canine, Dug (voiced by co-creator Petersen), is the essence of golden retriever: he loves Carl and Russell as soon as he sees and smells them.

It would be criminal to give away the multitude of sight and sound gags Docter and company build into the material. But step back and you appreciate how it all fits into the grand design: even the ground-hugging forms of a bulldog and a Rottweiler are suddenly aloft in World War I-era biplanes, like Snoopy battling the Red Baron.

The ending, always difficult for a globetrotting adventure, is sublime -- emotionally complete. Docter has really understood what Dorothy meant when she said "There's no place like home" in The Wizard of Oz. In Up you can go home again and bring a bit of the world with you.

Up (Disney/Pixar) With the voices of Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer and Jordan Nagai. Directed by Pete Docter. Rated PG for some action. Time 96 minutes.