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He was one of the first employees at Pixar, and now Pete Docter brings us the tenth animated feature from the groundbreaking studio. He tells FOCUS how he made Up fly.
With the striking image of a house suspended by thousands of balloons, soaring above the cityscapes and off into a distant wilderness, Up is certainly an eye catching tale but it's also a poignant one.
The hero of the piece is 78 year old widower Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) who embarks on this fantastic voyage in order to fulfil an ambition long held but never achieved with his late wife Ellie.
There is something counter intuitive in choosing to focus on an older character, and a wonderfully grumpy one at that, embodied by Ed Asner who is still fondly remembered for his acerbic television role as Lou Grant.
"I think we really were attracted to Ed’s gruffness," director Pete Docter smiles. "We wanted somebody with that hard edge and yet somebody with a soft underside to him as well. Ed was our first choice and we were lucky enough that he said yes."
That being the case the filmmakers were well aware that a 78 year old leading man would need to be handled more gently than a younger actor, though Asner proved equal to the challenge.
"There's a lot of stuff, especially in the third act where he's running and jumping and all this active stuff and we really made him sweat. But Ed is such a good sport that he said to bring it on. We would volunteer to stop, we could see he was getting tired and we would be about to let him go home and he'd say 'no, no, I still see pages there, let's finish it up,'."
While the film is a touching meditation on love and relationships, on friendship and loyalty, it is also a technical exercise with a minute attention to detail. Fourteen years ago, when Pete Docter was promoting Toy Story in his capacity as co-writer and supervising animator, he explained the challenges at hand.
Every aspect of the physical world on screen had to be created, from the light and shade, to the physical forms and the unifying truths that make it real - like the solid floor which supports the characters without them passing through it. All this had to be established, coded and programmed into the Pixar computers.
So many years on such things are taken in the considerable stride of the Pixar team, but each new movie brings with it fresh challenges. With Up this included creating thousands of individual balloons moving independently of each other, establishing the physical dimensions of Carl and his travelling companion Russell, and the various layers and textures to the clothes they wear.
But the joy of Pixar films is and always has been that the technology does not overshadow the storytelling, which here gives a new lease of life to cinema's most daring septuagenarian which - who knows?- may spark a new trend in movies.
"That haven't been a lot like Carl," says Docter, "but he seemed to offer a lot of opportunity for humour and emotion. I think it paid off."
The film opens with Carl as a boy. We see his friendship with a little girl named Ellie that blossoms into love and a long and happy marriage. All this is compressed into a dialogue free montage that expresses the passing years with rare beauty and a wonderful economy of storytelling.
"We knew it was necessary to feel Carl's loss," Docter adds, "that's what was going to drive the rest of the film, this intense need that he has to fulfil this dream that he and his wife never got to go on. That was a very necessary thing, and our approach was to step back from it and to present it to the audience and try not to over-sentimentalise it.
"So basically it was silent, with music but without sound effects, so the audience can input their own emotion. I was equating it to my parents taking Super 8 film of us growing up, so that when you watch it there's no sound at all, just the flicker of the projector. It's more emotional somehow, just having the visuals.
"We took that kind of approach for the beginning and I think it was essential not only for the journey of the character but to have that bedrock on which to built the comedy and wacky stuff. Films I love, like Dumbo and It's A Wonderful Life, find that sort of balance."
When word got out that Up featured a more mature kind of hero discussion raged about the wisdom of it. There may be no fast food figurine to collect on this film, but this is a distraction from the matter in hand.
What Pixar have achieved, as they so often do, is create a vividly realised story that touches its audience however old they might be.
"I love it when you go to movies that remind you how precious life is," Docter nods. "I think one reason we go to movies is to experience that."
ANWAR BRETT
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