Flying House Tour
In fact, a short animated film Partly Cloudy, shown before the feature, had already brought me to tears once. My nose turned sour when the battered, featherless bird finally returned to the dark clouds of solitude. And a few seconds later, the heavily armed big bird is still by the dark clouds out of the electric eel again devastated, seeing here I laughed again. The smile was so good that all the tears I had tried to hold back came out, and the corners of my eyes were wet, but the corners of my mouth kept rising. Sure enough, laughing and crying is my go-to expression for Pixar animations. I couldn’t find anything to wipe away my tears. Luckily, I was wearing long sleeves, so I wiped the corners of my eyes with my cuff instead of a tissue. However, the later screening of Up made me realize that it was a big mistake not to have a handkerchief in my bag to wipe my tears. When I finally left the cinema, my right hand cuff was completely soaked.
Most of Pixar’s animated features are rated G, which is suitable for any age group according to the US film rating system. Pixar, therefore, is intent on feeding as many viewers as possible, so the stories are often told in parallel. The shallower layer is obvious and is intended for uninitiated children. And the deep layer is often helpless, sad and moved by the mix, it is told to have more or less understood what love what is death adults listen to is. In Up, Grandpa Carl and little boy Russell fight against the evil explorer and rescue the Amazing Bird is a legend of Pixar to tell children, while the ordinary trivial but touching love between Carl and his wife Ellie is a fairy tale of Pixar to give adults.
This adult fairy tale unfolds like an andante song in the first ten minutes of the film. Grandpa Carl and grandma Ellie are both children who love adventure dreams when they were young. They meet in an old abandoned house by chance. My teeny-tiny grandmother shared her dream Adventure destination with her teeny-tiny grandfather — her hand-crafted “My Adventure Book” with a picture of a waterfall. The legend of this waterfall, “paradise fall,” in South America, as the name suggests, has a beauty that only heaven can seem to match. So “Go to South America to find paradise waterfall” in the heart of two children as if the future life of the first priority. That’s easy to say, but what is South America? “South America, probably like the United States, only south it was a child.
But then they grew up, and the two children fell in love and married and moved into the house where they had first met. Adventure was still a dream, so she became a tour guide in South America at the theme park, while he sold balloons not far from her. The wonderland of South America’s waterfalls was still an obsession, so the two began to put money into the Paradise Falls Fund in anticipation of the day when they would have enough for the trip. But life is full of accidents, one day a car needs a new tire, the next a broken arm needs medical attention, “Paradise Falls fund” is always used before the full. Life has its moments, and two people who want a child so badly don’t know the happiness of being someone else’s parents. Fortunately, we still have each other. Fortunately, we can watch the changing clouds and sunset together every day, and we can sit side by side on the sofa next to each other, just holding hands, even if not saying anything. Time is like this in tie pattern, cloud shape and sunset color flow in the day, and so back to God, two people have white hair. He suddenly realized that his life was almost over before he could go to South America with her. So she made up her mind, bought a plane ticket and planned to surprise her on her regular sunset viewing, when she would no longer be able to climb the hill where they had watched sunsets together for decades. What I’ve said above is just a few minutes in the movie. There is not a single line in these minutes, only the most ordinary scenes of life in turn in a soft warm tone. Some places of processing is very implicit, just a little bit, did not say, so that the final picture appeared on the funeral grandpa sad figure, sitting next to me a little girl who has not yet gone to school asked her mother: “What happened?” Also, how can a child understand so many small and deep sweet and sad things contained in these few minutes? And understand the people, even if only a little understand such as me, this time already tears.
And then those adventures in the jungles and rocks of South America weren’t really my concern. While Russell’s chubby Asian kid face is tempting to pinch, Kevin the Amazing Bird’s garish look is hilarious, and the seemingly villain Golden Retriever Dug is endearing, that doesn’t hide the relative weakness of the script. Fortunately, Pixar is so sincere in animation technology that I can enjoy watching it. What I’m dying to know is how Carl and Ellie’s fairy tale will end, and whether Carl will be able to set up his house near the waterfall as promised? So what if you do? Will he be relieved? Or a long wish, but like lost faith no direction?
The moment when Carl alone drags the sinking house one step at a time and finally reaches the waterfall is handled in an unremarkable way, with none of Disney’s usual personal heroism. His face could not see the joy of the realization of the dream, in addition to fatigue seemed a little disappointed. As he entered the house, which had flown halfway around the world, he was greeted by a mess. The old man lifted up the sofa where the couple had been sitting next to each other and sat in his seat with a dream view of the waterfall outside the window. So it’s all over? But why the destination has arrived, and the knot seems to still not untie Carl found Ellie’s treasured childhood Book, “My Adventure Book, “and after a lifetime, it was in its rightful place, but the owner was gone. The old man ran his hand through the pages of the journal and finally stopped on the page that said, “Things I am going to do.” It’s the childish handwriting of a tomboyish Ellie who once threatened to spend the rest of her diary chronicling adventures in South America. Carl looked guilty when he touched the line. Maybe it was because he wasted his life in the trifles of life that the second half of this journal could never be filled. And what Carl saw later, he didn’t expect, and I didn’t expect. The second half of the journal wasn’t blank, but instead Ellie had pasted pages of photos. When these films appeared at the beginning of the fragments of life with a frozen moment to reproduce, I once again like a fool tears to not be able to own. And this time, I wasn’t sorry that we were never together, but I was moved by the depth of Ellie’s love. The final image shows Ellie, now a grandmother, sitting by a window as the warm sun outside casts a soft shadow on the side of her face. I wonder how powerful it is to fall in love with someone, to make the tomboy with an afro, careless and restless become this serene and peaceful old man with a face full of happiness and contentment. In fact, she has already realized: if to travel to adventure is to meet the wonderful scenery never seen, experience never thought of the full life, and then meet with you is the most gorgeous adventure I can think of. Perhaps that’s why she was able to leave the words “Thanks for the adventures” on the last page of her journal.
Many people use the word “Up” as “dream”, but it seems to me that the key word in this story should be “hold on”. In many Japanese TV dramas I watched, this word is often used to describe a kind of human relationship similar to predestination and emotional entanglements. In short, because of something or chance, two people are no longer just two points in a random walk in time and space, but embark on a life track linked together. As far as Carl was concerned, what held him and Ellie together was a trip to South America and the house they lived in together. That’s why he was so desperate to protect this house and that promise, as if the bond between him and Ellie would be broken if the house were destroyed or the promise to reach the waterfall failed to materialize. But Ellie learned before Carl that when the relationship is strong enough, it’s the most powerful bond between the two of them, and when it comes to the house or the trip to South America, it’s not necessary. So she was able to put down the dream of adventure and become the old man sitting by her window with a happy face. But thanks to Ellie’s messages and photos, Carl realizes that his bond with Ellie is more permanent than he ever thought, so he can clear out the house he once treasured, and when it finally drifts away into the clouds, just lightly say a “It’s just a house.” The house is not how, the agreement is not reached and how, with those good memories of life together, in fact, two people have been together. After all, Pixar still loves fairy tales. In the end, the house falls down beside the waterfall, just like the two of them agreed. Only at this point, it doesn’t matter.
Looking Up, I am in my early twenties. Just like Ellie in her childhood, I have a heart that dreams everywhere. Many times I have packed up my bag and left home to travel far away. I have also climbed high mountains, walked through endless forests, and seen breathtaking cliff canyons. I used to tell friends that I couldn’t imagine anything that would take me away from my freedom to roam. And now I think that I think so, maybe because I haven’t met the really good relationship. If one day, there is a deeply tied with me in my life, maybe I will be like Ellie later, willing to slowly fall down, in the person’s side to take root, and that person together grow two side by side tree. Then he went nowhere, watching the clouds and stars change day by day in the little patch of sky above them. Just like Carl and Ellie, life, no matter how small, is a magnificent adventure because it’s with you.
