Up: Critic Reviews

As buoyant and richly tinted as the balloons that figure so prominently in its story, Up is also thoroughly grounded in real emotion and ideas of substance.

As in their finest work, the Pixar filmmakers have created thrilling cinema simply by rifling through its history.

A masterclass in narrative exposition, and the moments explaining their childlessness will bring a lump to your throat.

Easily the summer's, and probably the year's, most enchanting movie, Up is a buoyant delight.

Pixar has done it again, in every best way possible.

Because the movie's grounded, it's free to fly where it wants, and it does so with an exuberance and poignancy that at times feels majestic.

Rest assured, it gets funny. And it's thrilling, too, as the third act takes place almost entirely in the sky.

While their latest achievement can't quite one-up WALL-E, it offers soaring highs that are bound to enchant viewers of any age.

The characterizations are fairly coarse cartoons, in contrast to the emotionally rich cartoons that have become Pixar's hallmark. They're more schematic than organic, and that applies to the plotting as well.

It propels the viewer up, up and away in an experience combining smart, imaginative storytelling with dazzling dreamlike visuals, creating an experience that is the special province of animation -- at once utterly convincing and completely impossible.

The lessons of Up lift us, even as they ground our heroes in what really matters.

The look of Up is a world away from Pixar's usual CGI intricacies -- simple in a way that only artists with a genius for complexity can achieve.

The movie is packed with lovely jokes, some of them funny in inexplicable ways.

This is a wonderful film. It tells a story. The characters are as believable as any characters can be who spend much of their time floating above the rain forests of Venezuela.

It feels nervy and adventurous and a little messy, the result of formidable creators and genuine wits working on an enormous budget, enormously well-spent.

Writer-directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson present hilarious insights into bird brains and canine psychology and treat thornier human emotions deftly.

How much do I love this movie? If it were mathematically possible, I'd give it five stars out of four.

From the title onward, Up is a stratospheric success. It's guaranteed to lift your spirits, and not with a pushy DreamWorks-style gag reel of celebrity voices and committee-processed one-liners.

There are not words enough to express how good Up is.

Through its writing, direction and execution, Up doesn't just achieve hipness, it transcends it. With its spirit of fun and adventure, it echoes Raiders of the Lost Ark (only funnier) -- it's a thrill ride, but a thrill ride with heart.

[Up] could easily have been cloying, but instead proves disarming in its deep reserves of narrative imagination and surprise, as well as its poignant thematic balance of dreams deferred and dreams fulfilled.

An exquisite work of cinematic art that also happens to be the funniest, most touching, most exciting and most entertaining movie released so far this year.

A feather-light farce with a delicious dose of the sentimental, it isn't the animation company's biggest, most complicated or even its best. It's just a film in which most every oddball element of an odd yet familiar story works.

Up is a story of human bonds remembered and new ones forged, and never for one moment does it seems insincere or contrived.

The outrageously inventive fable that it tells lifts it above the mundane and sends it floating off to the heights of charm as if carried by a helium balloon.