We went to the Odeon cinema at Dickens World this afternoon to see the latest offering from Pixar - "Up".
Taking it from the beginning, we had three trailers to enjoy - all of which looked promising - Planet 51, a new Nanny McPhee film, and Nativity. (By the way I really love the opening sequence to Disney films that we've had for the last couple of years - starting with the the steam train, and then panning back to come over the castle with the flag flying at the top, and the river running underneath it - always means that we are in for a Disney treat!)
I had forgotten that the first few minutes would be the latest short, which as always was lovely. It was called "Partly Cloudy" and was the story of the stork that drew the short straw. Apparently, it turns out that when storks bring babies (animal and human) they collect them from clouds, and our hero was the stork who had the pleasure of bringing baby animals that aren't quite so cuddly, so we saw it getting more and more frazzled as it had to do deliveries of a baby crocodile, a ram and a hedgehog, and at the end an electric eel! Not quite up there with "For the Birds" but then again that is one of those pieces of film that will make me laugh 'til I cry no matter how many times I watch it!
Then on to the main attraction. I didn't know very much about the story before going in, other than that there was an old man's house that floated away tethered to thousands of helium balloons. The wonderful people at Pixar haven't lost their ability to tell a truly magical story and this film was just great.
The story started with Carl (the old guy) as a young boy dreaming of great adventures, and meeting a girl called Ellie who had similar dreams. Then we had a brief musical montage of their life together - falling in love, getting married, dreaming of having children but not being able to, always thinking about going off for their great adventure, growing old together, and then Ellie falling ill and passing away, leaving Carl alone and lonely. This little segment was done with such tenderness that seeing Carl old and alone, missing his wife really brought a tear to the eye.
To avoid being packed off to an old people's home, Carl decided that the time for the great adventure had arrived, and that the way to achieve it was to tie thousands of helium balloons to his house and to float away to Paradise Falls, the place that he and his wife had spent a lifetime dreaming about. Inadvertently he ended up taking Russell, an eight year old cub scout with him, and the rest of the film shows us their adventure together and the relationship that the develop (along with a talking dog called Dug and a rare flightless bird that Russell decides to call Kevin!).
More Pixar magic - we love it!