It’s Just a House: The Sheer Magnificence of Pixar’s Up
“It is a grief story; therefore, at its heart, it is a love story.”
This article is dedicated to Peter Connell and my Grandfather, James Carey, who both loved adventure almost as much as they loved their families.
For some reason, people often ask me:
“Alana, what are the major themes that come up in your writing?
I usually say:
“Two things: love, grief, and toilet humour.”
“That’s three things, Alana.”
Aww, come on, everyone! Surely we know better by now Grief and Love are clones of each other, one good and one bad. It’s on all those TikTok slides of heartbreaking quotes that have cluttered my For You Page; you know, the ones that make it impossible to get over someone who never liked you in the first place?
“Okay, whatever. Why didn’t you just say Love or Grief? Naming them separately makes it seem like you’re still saying they’re two separate things, which aren’t they? “
Yes exactly! They are, and they aren't. Even if Love and Grief have the same DNA, they both deserve to have names. As similar as they are, they exist as opposite experiences. To put it like a preschool teacher, it’s nice when feelings have names! We need them to sit in our memory and explain what we can’t. If anything, these opposite experiences that mirror each other in fiery opposition need names because sometimes fake answers are the only things that keep us from going haywire. Even if Grief is just Love left in the fridge to mould, we must name it because how could we fathom the best feeling in our lives as the same one at risk of ruining them? Grief and Love are clones but exist in separate bodies, codependent but autonomous.
“Alana, as this random voice who seems to ask you this in all your articles, I must say, what the hell is your point? “
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I'm glad you asked! The duality is relevant in how it relates to one of my favourite pieces of art. The art we grow to love in our formative years bleeds into the art we strive to create. Duh! It is crucial to think about the yin and yang of Grief and Love because this duality sits at the centre of my favourite film of all time, Up.
I first saw Up when it came out in the spring of 2009. I was aware of Up’s emotional impact at that age, but I didn’t feel that effect personally. It was spectacular to look at and 10-year-old me would do anything to see cartoon dogs talk to each other, so I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t feel the need to watch it more than once. I hadn’t known that in a year, loss would come knocking on my door to collect my childhood, the tax one often pays as a young griever.
I had rediscovered Up at sixteen, in a neurodivergent special interest frenzy over Disney and Pixar films. I was in the throes of another loss I was terrified of coming to terms with. Buried in my need to revert to a childlike state, I dug further into a past self, hoping to bring some semblance of what was back with me. Before there was therapy, there was Up, and thus I developed an innate need to defend it. I didn’t know how to answer people when they asked why Up was my favourite movie. “I just think it’s a beautiful film” was my go-to. As I tended to my relationships with creativity and grief, my reasoning around my fondness for the film became clearer and clearer.
Everyone knows Up for its first 10 minutes, a montage accompanied by an unforgettable theme song. “Married Life” introduces us to the relationship between Carl and Ellie, childhood best friends who grow up together, falling for each other's mutual spirit of adventure. As any married couple would, they have their trials and tribulations: Ellie suffers a miscarriage, and financial burdens put their dreams of travelling the world on hold. Yet, the two maintain a deep bond in the house they built together, painted in a style reminiscent of their love: colourful, cosy, and warm. The day Carl finally saves enough money to surprise Ellie with the trip to Paradise Falls, she falls fatally ill. In her last scene, she sits in her hospital bed and slides the book in her lap to Carl as her parting gift: My Adventure Book. Carl kisses Ellie on the forehead, and we say goodbye to her with him.
Without an ounce of dialogue, the music and visuals tell one of the most subtly epic love stories of all time. “Married Life” is a work of genius. This is no secret. However, an important detail that follows Ellie’s funeral often gets overlooked. Later, Carl sits alone in their house and tries to look through the adventure scrapbook Ellie made for him, but as he gets to a page called Stuff I’m Going to Do, he falters. He cannot go through with looking at the dreams his beloved never got to fulfil. The person she never got to be. He never took the chance when he had it to give Ellie her dream. At least, this is what Carl has convinced himself of.
I won’t bore you with an entire synopsis: Boy Scout Russell gets stuck on Carl’s porch as the old man finishes tying thousands of balloons to his house that lift it into the air, flying through storms until they land, miraculously, in Paradise Falls together. They meet a talking dog named Dug and an exotic bird named Kevin, who is on the run from Charles Muntz, an ex-communicated archaeologist who wants the bird for himself. It's an absolute delight of a film based on that summary alone!
One specific scene in Up solidifies it as my favourite movie of all time. Carl abandons an injured Kevin with Charles Muntz, who threatens to set the house on fire. Carl’s abandonment of Kevin for the safety of an old house angers Russell, so the young scout goes off to save the bird on his own. Without a word left to say, Carl clings desperately to his love, embodied by the house, and walks back inside. He sits on his usual chair next to Ellie’s. The most devastating song in the entire score is not Married Life, but the music that plays over this scene entitled “Stuff We Did.” Carl goes to the adventure book, preparing for a massive salt pour into his raw wound. As he flips to the Stuff I’m Going to Do page, the music starts as he heaves a shaky sigh that anyone who has ever lost someone will recognise. He prepares himself for the empty pages. The loss of a possible future fades into a forgotten past. The adventures Ellie longed for died with her, and Carl cannot cope with the dread of it. As he folds over the page, we see a tiny corner of what seems to be…a photograph? Carl and the audience are both curious as he flips it open. We see pages and pages of pictures and memories that Ellie had put together in her final days. It’s almost as if “Married Life” gets a sequel montage here, as we see more beautiful moments of their life together, this time the stunning simplicity of growing old with someone you wholeheartedly love, which to some, is the rarest dream to fulfil of all. The music softly builds and further evokes an all too familiar ache. “Stuff We Did” perfectly captures that delicate sense of melancholy, trying to live happily in memory while confronting the reality of what it means to remember.
Ellie leaves us a duality with her scrapbook: the ordinary aesthetic of two people growing up and growing old together in the town they were raised in, doing mundane things, same day every day, etc., against the magic of lasting, unconditional love. No one lives the life they think they are going to live. Inevitably, love cannot help but shape the way we navigate life. In some way or another, whether due to envy or gratitude, deficit or surplus, we live our lives around love. Ellie says this to Carl in her goodbye collage, leaving a perfect note at the end: “Thanks for the adventure. Now go have a new one!” Carl reaches for her handwriting like it’s her hand for his to hold once more. Touched, he vows to keep this one last promise to her. He crosses his heart as she used to when they were children and sets off with the house as his vehicle to save Russell, a little boy who needs love, too. Saving the day, he embraces Kevin, Dug, and Russell after rescuing them from Muntz on the villain’s giant blimp. Carl’s hands release the house to form the group hug, and realising it all too late, Carl watches his beloved home slip into the clouds below. Russell, noticing Carl's bittersweet look, offers his condolences:
“Sorry about your house Mr Fredriksen.”
To which Carl responds with what might be my favourite line of the film:
“Ya know, it’s just a house.”
It is, of course, and it isn’t. The whole film centres around the idea that this wacko old man is so obsessed with his dead wife that he flies their house to South America. This line points out the film's absurdity and vulnerability. We, too, feel that pang of sadness as we watch the house disappear. It is just a house but also the life Carl built with Ellie, the version of his life that died with her. It is a lifetime of cherished memories. Carl knows now that dreams do not die with those that bore them. Going on this new adventure is Carl's way of keeping Ellie and the dream alive. It’s just a house. It’s not Ellie. She stays with Carl, their adventure ends and begins all at once.
This leads to one of the movie's last scenes. In this picturesque landscape, the house has landed in its final resting place, atop Paradise Falls, looking out into the vast scenery, almost identical to the picture Ellie drew as a little girl all that time ago.
The film's motto, "Adventure is out there”, speaks volumes to the story as a grief narrative. It’s terrifying to say goodbye to someone you love. When you mourn a past, you equally mourn a future. Love is a risk that begs to be taken despite the inevitable danger. “Adventure is out there” encourages us to keep going, even when we feel no adventure left within us. The person Carl cannot bear to live without tells him, in the end, to honour her death by accepting it. Celebrate the life they shared by continuing to live it. Ellie’s legacy lies in her love for Carl. With that, she lives on.
The most recent time I was asked what my favourite movie was, the response I got when I said Up was interesting.
“Oh, I hated the villain. He didn’t make sense, he was too old, and it seemed like a dumb origin story. I mean, come on, a bird? Don’t you hate birds?”
I indulged my friend,
“Yeah, I don’t love birds, but it's a movie! And I am not sure Muntz is the real villain.”
“Oh yeah, then who would you say is?”
I paused. It was a fair question.
“I don’t know. The passage of time, I guess.”
I was met with a friendly eye-roll and an accusation of being cliche, which is fair!
My instinct was to make a poor assumption that this person had never experienced grief. I recognised that was unfair of me, though. Grief isn’t like a bad fake tan; you can’t spot it immediately. Maybe they thought the villain was pointless to the point that it took away from the grief plot. Perhaps they were still coming to terms with something and weren’t ready for their next adventure. I laughed and said,
“To each their own.”
We all have our opinions. I try not to yuck people’s yums and try harder to act graciously when my yum is yucked, but I find Up to be such a beautiful film. Even with the chaos of the talking dogs and the weird Clint Eastwood-esque villain, it’s hard for me to believe someone could dislike it that much. Ed Asner in the starring role, the breathtaking animation feels unreal, and the story at the heart of it is very real, at least to me. So yes, after this conversation, I felt it necessary as an artist to profess my love for one of my favourite pieces of art.
Up is my favourite movie because it doesn’t necessarily say move the fuck on, grief only ages you; you can’t live in the past etc. Instead, it reminds us that grief is what love sees on a bad day, staring back at it in a front-facing camera. To seek ‘new adventures’ and try to feel love again when you have been robbed in such a way is not an easy task. It's also a horrifying truth that when we lose someone, it’s difficult not to succumb to the anticipation of when it will strike again. How can we cope if life is but loss after loss after loss? I know I tend to get stuck there. Nonetheless, we must remind ourselves why we grieve, why this pent-up love begging for a home haunts us and allows us to face grief as it is. We all must live with that unavoidable pain as those who brave the conditions of love. It never goes away, but we aim to learn to somewhat tame that wretched beast. We can take parts of our love for those that have gone and give it new life as we engage with new things and experiences. We can shape past and present together to ensure that those we miss still appear in our futures, living on in each shared laugh, eye roll, and bear hug. It doesn’t mean we won’t carry that ache. Loss is loss, and we cannot change that. I'm not sure how we take our old adventures with us in a way where we’re open to new ones. We each have to come to that conclusion on our own, taking the signs when we’re ready, as Carl did when he finally realised Ellie lived her dream life because he made her life a dream.
Up is a film that provides an incredible basis for my writing and the why of it all. It shows us the twin flame dynamic of love and grief, meshed in a confusing twist of agony and ease. It also has talking dogs and at least one poop joke. It’s for all ages and all experiences. It’s a grief story; therefore, at its heart, it is a love story. To anyone who has struggled with loss, trying to understand the depth of love that’s been left in the cold: I wish you luck on your next adventure.