When I first heard about 'Up', the story of an old man that attempts to fulfill a lifelong fantasy of going to a remote South American wilderness called Paradise Falls by taking off in a house suspended by balloons, it began like a possible Hayao Miyazaki film plot. The trailer showing the inclusion of a fat geeky kid and a talking dog as the old man's companions made it look like a Miyazaki plot passed through Disney's butt. So my approach to seeing it was more in the vein of “Oh well, at least it'll look good” than with any expectation of a genuinely engrossing movie. Silly me, because Up need have no shame in its inspirations and is, along with The Incredibles, one of the finest films Disney has made.

At less than a 100 min of running time, Up is one of the shorter Pixar films, a function of its getting on with the story right off the bat. A nostalgic and, in its strongest moments, wordless prologue flies us through the entire life of Carl and Ellie, taking off from their first meeting as nerdy 50's children, floating through marriage and home-life, finally setting us down when Ellie passes away, leaving Carl a lonely grouchy old man in a neighborhood whose deterioration and loss of identity mirrors his own infirmity. At one point Carl decides he has had enough of this existence and resolves to fulfill a childhood promise to Ellie of following in the footsteps of their mutual hero, the Professor Challanger-esque Charles Muntz who flew off to Paradise falls decades before with the promise of bringing back a previously unknown bird species. Using the improbable idea of buoying up his entire house with all its possessions with helium balloons, Carl takes off for the South American paradise; only he has an inadvertent stowaway in the form of Russel, a fat geeky do-gooder boy-scout. The rest of Up's breathless narrative deals with their adventures to get to Paradise falls, and what happens to them when they reach there.

Up's eagerness to get on with the spectacle portion of the narrative is of course understandable. It could never have been easy to sell the concept of an old man's wish fulfillment quest as a hugely mounted family entertainer. The benefit of this is that Up does not wallow in the emotional treacle that weighs down other films in the genre, but at the same time invests sufficiently in its lead character for us to empathize with his desires and his frustrations. And Carl (voiced brilliantly by Ed Asner) is in his own way a very likable chap. The tricks he plays on Russel (and an immensely hilarious fantasy scenario that plays out when they are floating in the house) betray a wicked sense of humor that only make him more human than the cruddy old men Hollywood offers out even in its live-action movies.

Christopher Plummer as the masterful explorer Muntz makes a charming foil (yes, Carl must duke it out with his former idol), if you will allow for his sprightliness as a centenarian. Well, given that in this movie, you also allow for a sedentary 70 year old performing all manner of acrobatic maneuvers, and incredible trained dogs with speech modules that enable them to understand every gamut of human conversation (though for your amusement they still get hung up on terms like 'treat' and 'squirrel'), it's not a lot more to ask for; All in the name of entertainment and that is amply provided. Dug the talking dog (“I have just met you and I love you”) actually makes for a humorous and endearing sidekick.

Even in their more mundane works, Pixar's prowess in animation has been marvelous; all the more so for this film. There are of course several breathtakingly gorgeous set-pieces, and the inside of Muntz's personal zeppelin (the 'Spirit of Adventure') is a thing of beauty. But there are also the little touches, visual jokes, subtle changes of expression, even the loose fibers on Carl's woolen jacket, that speak for the fanatical attention to detail that goes into making a Pixar feature. It is no secret that Miyazaki has been a huge inspiration to Disney's animators and some of the visuals here bear a strong resemblance to his work, especially Laputa: Castle in The Sky.

To sum Up, this is one family entertainer that actually lives up to the name, and one that, you'll definitely want to see.