At the risk of sounding terribly emotional and crossing the line into my private life, I have to say that I found the wordless montage near the beginning of Up showing Carl and Ellie’s marriage to be one of the saddest scenes I have ever seen in any film ever. The adventure parts were more conventional and nothing that we haven’t already seen a thousand times before, but as usual Pixar pulls it off competently and with aplomb.

I’m not going to spend too much time writing an extended review on this one, but I will say that one of the things I liked best about was how dark and honest it seemed for what is still ostensibly a child oriented cartoon. One scene where Carl talks with Russell about his parents ends on a awkward note just as he realizes that his parents are divorced. In most Disney-style fare, it would have been avoided entirely or brushed off in a lighthearted manner, but Up treats it in a much more mature and realistic way.

I’m also curious about how much children will like this film. The overarching theme is loss, including learning to accept it and move on. That’s not going to be something that most children are going to be able to understand. It’s not just the loss from the opening montage either. The great explorer Muntz has become warped because he refuses to give up on his obsessions while Carl and Ellie both ended up sacrificing their dreams and lived a normal life. But it is still a normal life that is fully, happily and meaningfully lived. Even Russell seems to lose his father at the end and learns to be happy despite it. For the strength of that theme alone, Up deserves to be treated as an adult film.

Fun bit of trivia: co-director Bob Peterson provided the voice for both Dug (“I have just met you, and I love you”) and Alpha.