Cannes hands out its top prize Sunday after a marathon battle between heavyweights like Quentin Tarantino and Jane Campion, with the critics’ money on lesser-known names from France and Austria.
The notoriously extravagant festival toned down the glitz for this year’s crisis-era bash and was lighter than usual in star power, but it still saw celebs like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sashay up the fabled red carpet.
Billed as a battle of auteur titans, it mostly lived up to expectations, with Britain’s Independent on Sunday calling it “a superior vintage” and France’s Journal du Dimanche declaring “the return of great cinema”.
Given the inherent three-dimensional quality evident in Pixar’s cutting-edge output, the fact that the studio’s 10th animated film is the first to be presented in digital 3-D wouldn’t seem to be particularly groundbreaking in and of itself.
But what gives “Up” such a joyously buoyant lift is the refreshingly nongimmicky way in which the process has been incorporated into the big picture — and what a wonderful big picture it is.
Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.
Up is an upcoming computer-animated 3-D film being produced by Pixar Animation Studios. It will be distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, and is scheduled for release on May 29, 2009 in North America and October 16, 2009 in the United Kingdom. The film is directed by Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter and features the voices of Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai and John Ratzenberger. It is the first Pixar film to be presented in Disney Digital 3-D.
Plot
Carl Fredricksen (Edward Asner) is 78 years old. When Carl was a child, he met and eventually married a girl named Ellie who grew up in a small midwestern town. Ellie always dreamed of exploring the mountains, but she died before she got a chance. Now, when developers threaten to move him into an assisted living home, Carl decides to fulfill his promise to Ellie. To accomplish this, he befriends a chubby eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer named Russell. The two opposites match up for thrilling adventures as they encounter wild terrain, unexpected villains, and all the terrifying creatures that wait in the jungle.
