On Movies: With 'Up,' director aims for a new 'toon

Up

, the brilliantly funny, sad, surreal story of an old geezer who hooks 10,000 balloons to his house and flies to South America, is Pixar's 10th animated feature.

And Pete Docter, Up's director and cowriter, has been with the pioneering computer-animation house from almost the start. He was the third animator hired by Pixar maestro John Lasseter back when the fledgling digital 'toon factory was just making shorts and commercials. Docter helped develop the story and characters for the studio's 1995 feature debut, Toy Story, and has nabbed four Oscar nominations along the way (for Toy Story; Monsters, Inc.; WALL-E; and Mike's New Car, a short).

And although Up doesn't have blue and green behemoths in it, or a lonely robot stranded on a post-apocalyptic world, or toy cowboys come to life, in some ways, it's the most daringly different title in the entire Pixar canon.

First off, there's its cranky septuagenarian hero (voiced by Ed Asner).

Secondly, there's a four-minute-plus wordless montage that compresses a married couple's entire life together - including a miscarriage and a death - that will leave you weeping.

This is animation that doesn't take you where you expect to go.

"That's good, isn't it?" says Docter, in Philadelphia last week on his return from Cannes, where Up - in 3-D - premiered, with an opening-night gala. "I mean that's certainly what you're trying for. If you stop the film somewhere in the middle, you don't want people to have any clue where you're going.

"And yet, at the same time, I know a number of people have said that they feel like in a way this film is a return to some of the things we experimented with in Toy Story and Monsters, Inc., in terms of the approachability of the characters and the sort of goofy, funny stuff.

"So it has all these disparate elements, and the trick was getting it all to balance together so it didn't become too maudlin or saccharine, or too goofball. . . .

"That's what I admire about so many of the great films that I grew up with - Dumbo, say, and The Wizard of Oz - they have that great balance, and we're trying to get to that in this film, too."

Docter, 40, a Minnesotan who moved to California for art school (CalArts) and never left, started work on Up about five years ago with Bob Peterson (who gets co-director and -screenwriter credits). Tom McCarthy, writer and director of the arthouse gems The Station Agent and The Visitor, came aboard for a time as a screenwriter. Docter and Peterson looked for inspiration from sources far and wide.

"We just made a list of all sorts of things we wanted to work with, and one of them was this curmudgeonly, grouchy old-man-type guy," says Docter, who cites New Yorker cartoonist George Booth and the Muppets as key influences on Up's look and feel. "And then another one was just the idea of escaping - getting away from everything.

"And so the idea of a floating house came up, and it seemed very appealing. . . . For me, at the end of the day, especially with directing, I'm sort of peopled out. I'm an introvert in the sense that it takes energy for me to deal with other people, as opposed to gleaning energy from it. And so, just the idea of floating off into the skies seemed really cool.

"And then, of course, in the film, as I often do, you learn that what you really need to do is come back down and reconnect with people. As attractive as it seems to get away, it's not really the solution."

Up opens Friday in regular ol' 2-D and in 3-D, too. It's Pixar's first foray into the format. (At Cannes, the betuxed and begowned opening-night throngs were all sitting there in the Grand Palais wearing those plastic 3-D glasses.)

"That was a decision that was made maybe two years into the process," Docter says. "We were approaching it just like a traditional film, and John Lasseter said, 'We'd really love to make this in 3-D.' So we set up a whole study group to watch as many of the other 3-D films that had been done, to figure out what worked well and what didn't. . . .

"And we really tried to use it as a storytelling device: When [the old man] Carl feels closed off and shut out, we squash the space. When he arrives at the edge of the cliff and he looks out over these amazing vistas, we tried to get that sense of scale and depth. Overall, we treated the 3-D as a window looking in, as opposed to some stuff that comes out at you. We're a little bit more conservative with it."

At the height of production, as many as 300 people were toiling away at Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville, Calif. Computer animators, sound designers, a lighting team, model artists - there were even "virtual tailors" working on the characters' wardrobes.

"It's very analogous to a live-action film; it's just that it's all in computers," says Docter. "A lot of people, they hear computer animation, and they think, Oh, you just tap M-A-K-E F-I-L-M on the keyboard."

Not so.

"It's very much a process of amazing craftsmanship and artistry and ridiculous long hours," he says. "And this being our 10th one, I like to think that everybody is just getting better and better at it."

That "Trek" and "Terminator" guy. Last year, Anton Yelchin could (hardly) be found playing a high school rich kid in a little-seen teen comedy, Charlie Bartlett.

And this weekend? Well, Yelchin, all of 20 years old, can be seen on practically every other screen across the country, around the world: He's Chekov, the consonant-challenged Starfleet officer in J.J. Abrams' rocketing reboot of Star Trek.

And he's Kyle Reese, a key figure in Terminator Salvation, battling cyborgs alongside Christian Bale's John Connor.

"I have no idea how it happened," Yelchin deadpans. "It just sort of does. I'm just very lucky to be a part of these movies."

Reached on the phone at his home in L.A., Yelchin jokes about the difference between his two characters: The Russian Chekov hardly moves from his chair on the bridge of the Enterprise; Kyle Reese fires off rounds, frantically drives Jeeps, and is stalked and terrorized by alien 'bots.

"Let's put it this way: My action figure in Star Trek has a clipboard. My Terminator action figure I haven't seen yet, but I really hope it has me holding a shotgun and wielding a grenade launcher. Yeah, a lot more action in Terminator. . . .

"It really makes you feel like you're a little kid, like you're 4 years old again. And that was a huge kick for me, because when I was 4, I was obsessed with Terminator. I was pretending to do all of the things that I ended up really doing on the set. It was weirdly touching that way."