Up, the uplifting tale of 78-year-old balloon salesman, who finally fulfills his lifelong dream of a great adventure, is the 10th film from Disney•Pixar, which has produced an unprecedented streak of hugely successful films, including WALL•E, Ratatouille, Cars, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life and Toy Story.
Pixar now has nine of the 25 top grossing animated films of
all time domestically, and all nine have been #1 at the box office on their
opening weekends of wide release. WALL•E,
Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Finding
Nemo all earned Academy Awards® for Best Animated Feature, an award that
was introduced in 2001.
"I am so proud that Up
is Pixar's 10th film," says John Lasseter, executive producer and chief
creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. "I think it's the
funniest film that we've ever made, and also one of the most beautiful. We have
a main character that is an amazing hero.
"Carl Fredricksen is 78-years-old and
he travels the world in a flying machine of his own design and still has dinner
at 3:30 in the afternoon. He's the most unlikely hero you can imagine in an
action picture. He is a character who learns that the big adventures in life
are all the small things that happen in everyday life. Russell is one of the
most appealing and charming characters that we've ever created. Together with
Carl, these two characters light up the screen."
The film is directed by Pixar veteran Pete Docter, who
joined the studio in 1990—just the third animator to be brought on board. Along
with Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, Docter developed the story and characters for
Toy Story, Pixar's first full-length feature film, for which he also served as
supervising animator. He was a storyboard artist on A Bug's Life and wrote the initial story treatment for Toy Story 2. Docter made his debut as a
director on Monsters, Inc., which received an Academy Award® nomination for
Best Animated Feature Film. As one of Pixar Animation Studios' key creative
contributors, Docter garnered another Academy Award nomination for his original
story credit on Disney•Pixar's Oscar-winning WALL•E.
Docter says he's learned a lot over the course of Pixar's 10
films. "It never gets easier," he says. "There are always new ways that the story
conspires to trick us, to fool us into thinking we have the right solution.
It's only with a lot of reworking—and reworking and reworking—that you get good
stuff."
"We still don't know everything," he continues. "But we allow
ourselves to make mistakes. As Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, says, ‘if you
don't make mistakes, you're not taking enough risks.' I hope we never think of
ourselves as experts—we learn something new on every film."
Opening across the Philippines on August 19, Up is
distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures International.