Pixar Piety

Here is what you will hear about the new Pixar-animated movie Up.

You will hear that it is a work of magical whimsy, which it is. You will hear that it is entirely original, which it is, and extraordinarily imaginative, which it is. You will hear that it is immensely affecting, which it is, as my occasional whimpers and momentary sobs would have told you if you had been sitting next to me.

Here’s what you won’t hear about Up: It is, for long stretches, very boring.

This very slight story of an old man who attaches thousands of balloons to his house and floats it to South America (with a little stowaway in tow) is desperately underpopulated. For long stretches, we are in the company of a quiet senior citizen, a tiresome eight- year-old, a colorful bird that squawks, and a talking dog, all of whom are traveling slowly across a mountaintop plateau. The visuals are ravishing, but there really isn’t much going on, and when the plot finally kicks in, it’s both excessively wild and uninvolving.

There’s no reason for the scant number of people and animals on display, or for the static quality of the imagery. The great thing about animated pictures is that they dispense with performers, who are costly and have opinions of their own about the characters they play and the actions they take. The only limit on an animated director is his own imagination and the number of gigabytes on his hard drive. Past Pixar films have kept themselves very busy; if the characters in the foreground aren’t doing much, there’s plenty of action in the background to sustain the sense that we are in a living, breathing, three-dimensional world.

Up is perversely barren. Having chosen to set the movie near a South American jungle, director Pete Docter and writer Bob Peterson seem determined not to take too much advantage of their picturesque setting. Docter’s previous film as director was Pixar’s masterpiece, Monsters, Inc., an almost perfect blend of comedy, emotion, imagination, and thrills. Here, Docter seems intent on making something contemplative, a movie about age and dying and abandonment and the search for meaning, and doesn’t want us distracted by anything too cute or amusing.

He is certain to be universally praised for the purity of his work here, in large measure because Up isn’t like any other movie you’ve ever seen and people who see hundreds of movies every year are hurled into a wonderland of delight when they see something new. There’s another reason it will be celebrated, and that is because there is an unwritten but very potent law requiring that it be praised to the skies no matter how a critic secretly feels about it.

The fact is that you won’t hear anyone say Up is boring because it would be, well, improper to say it-just as you never heard anybody say its Pixar predecessor, Wall-E, completely ran out of steam in its disastrous second half, even though everybody knew it did. A cultural orthodoxy has been imposed on us, according to which it is impermissible to criticize a Pixar film.

Pixar, the cartoon maker whose 10 feature films since 1995 have set a new standard for the animated film, has now become an Object of Cultural Piety (OCP), which is simultaneously one of the deadliest and most potent forces known to man. Once someone or something becomes an OCP, it must be the subject of veneration.

I recall when Steven Spielberg, a director of commercial genius with storytelling weaknesses, was turned overnight into an OCP with the release of his Holocaust film Schindler’s List. I was at a Broadway show soon afterward when he walked down the aisle with his wife, Kate Capshaw, to take his seat, and the 1,400 people in attendance at the Palace Theater gave him a five-minute standing ovation.

Such was his unassailable OCP authority that even the release of his sequel to Jurassic Park, a dinosaurs-in-San Diego stinkeroo called The Lost World, was treated with reverence. And when Spielberg paid obeisance to the Greatest Generation with his problematic Saving Private Ryan the following year, it almost seemed as though the legions of photographers snapping his picture were catching a glimpse of an OCP halo over his nobly graying pate. Spielberg hasn’t made even a halfway decent movie since, and his fourth Indiana Jones movie was so lousy it began dawning on people that he might well have lost his creative spark entirely.

That is the danger built into becoming an OCP. It is an enviable accomplishment. It brings awards and praise and cash, and ensures you a place in the American Pantheon. But it almost always happens just after you have hit your peak and are on the way down. Critics may have dubbed Wall-E Pixar’s greatest work, but there is no chance it will be remembered as fondly, or thought of with affection as deeply, as Toy Story or Finding Nemo or even Cars, which is the least of them but does manage to burrow itself into a child’s consciousness and won’t let go.

I like Up more than Wall-E, and thought its opening 20 minutes and closing 20 were really something special. But if this is the way Pixar is going, in another few years the sight of that little jumping table lamp at the beginning of a film is going to trigger a yawn, not a burst of excitement.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.