As far as movie titles go, it’s pretty hard to top Up, the name of Pixar’s tenth animated feature. In a mere syllable it seems not only to allude to a literal journey by balloon ride, but at the buoyancy of spirit that permeates the whole affair. It’s also a pretty good description for the ongoing trajectory of Pixar itself.

Up was born out of the simple idea of a man in a floating house. It’s a compelling starting point, with shades of Terry Gilliam, Hayao Miyazaki and Roald Dahl, but it’s the Pixar touch that turns it to magic. Written and directed by Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter, Up turns out to be as sophisticated and enjoyable as Pixar’s finest work, with possibly even more emotional depth than anything the studio has done before.

It’s the late 1930s. Carl is an eight-year-old boy with a spring in his step and bright bespectacled eyes on the lookout for adventure. He finds it in a kindred spirit, Ellie (voice of Pete’s daughter Ellie), who is already making preparations for a trip to Paradise Falls in Venezuela. Ellie has her own Adventure Book ready for the journey, with a title page marked, poignantly, ‘Stuff I’m Going To Do’.

What follows is a wordless four-minute sequence of startling beauty, a montage that encompasses Carl and Ellie’s lives together: growing up, marrying, lazing about in the sepia glow of young love, planning a family… all up until, with the dream of Paradise Falls still unrealised, Ellie passes away. It’s a heartbreaking little film within a film, set to a charming little number from composer Michael Giacchino (Ratatouille, The Incredibles and, more recently, Star Trek) in which the melody is relayed like a baton from instrument to instrument until it arrives, somewhat played out, at a lone piano. Only the world of animation, with its heightened and simplified reality, could give us a sequence of such purity and clarity.

Now Carl, or Mr. Fredricksen as we ought to call him (voice of Ed Asner), is a grumpy 78-year-old widower whose most courageous journey is the one he takes to the front porch (Docter employs the fiery motifs from the opera Carmen to hilarious effect here). But there’s some fight in the old dog yet. When it looks as though he’s about to be whisked away to a retirement home, Fredricksen hoists his house up with a thousand colourful helium balloons, takes flight and sets a course for Paradise Falls.
 
As we know from the trailer, Fredricksen soon finds he has a stowaway on board in the form of Russell (voice of Jordan Nagai), an over-eager Wilderness Explorer Scout hoping to earn his last scouts badge for ‘Assisting the Elderly’. The pair touch down in South America, and on the long walk to Ellie’s dreamed-of spot on Paradise Falls, they encounter a 13-foot-tall bird with a fondness for chocolate; Dug, a dog with a voice box on his collar that allows him to speak his thoughts – easily the most acutely observed movie portrayal of a talking animal in a long time (voiced by Bob Peterson, who co-directed and wrote the screenplay with Docter); and Fredrickson’s childhood hero, disgraced explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). And of course there’s the hope that, along the way, Fredricksen might come to a realisation about what constitutes a real ‘adventure’.

It’s difficult to see the leading duo together – Fredricksen’s rectangularity and Russell’s Humpty Dumpty roundness (he’s almost shaped like a balloon himself) – without thinking of the similar contrast in the character design of Wall-E and Eve. But the look of Fredricksen and Russell is actually part of what distinguishes Up from past Pixar films: it’s far more stylised, far more cartoonish. There are moments that evoke the madcap flavour of Looney Tunes: an object making a whistling sound as it falls from a great height; regurgitating birds; and the Mel Blanc stylings of Dug and the other canine goons (Dug’s vocal style should ring a bell for a few generations of Bugs Bunny fans). Which all fits perfectly with the fanciful notion of travelling through the sky by house, of course.

Up also treats us to a hearty dollop of classic Disney high adventure. There are well-choreographed, vertiginous action sequences to rival those peppered through The Incredibles, and we get what feels like the first bona-fide Pixar villain, with scenes of bona-fide villainy, in a long time. After Andrew Stanton’s magnificent space-epic-love story Wall-E and Brad Bird’s exquisite culinary farce Ratatouille before that, it’s almost a guilty pleasure to enjoy the old-school 1930s Saturday afternoon serial fare that Up celebrates and revels in, but it’s a pleasure nonetheless.

Wall-E was a profound artistic achievement and a tough act to follow, but Up has a bravery of its own, offering not just a geriatric protagonist and his pudgy Asian-American kid sidekick (much to the chagrin of the toy manufacturers), but a sensitive treatment of love, divorce, miscarriage and death. Pixar have touched on the inexorable march of time before (“I’m sorry honey, but… toys don’t last forever,” Andy’s Mom tells him), but Up handles the subject of mortality and unfinished business with devastating honesty. There’s also the first jarring sight of blood in a Pixar film – not oh-dear-a-pinprick-from-a-spindle blood, but real blood from a real injury that you almost can’t believe you’re seeing in a film from the House of Mouse. The overwhelming impression is, finally… an animated film about real people.

It would be cruel to draw comparisons with other animated films – I seem to recall another studio whose logo actually features a bouquet of balloons – but it would also be missing a crucial point, that Pixar is not just making the best animated films around, but the best films around. They soar to bold new heights with Up. Ten movies in, Pixar’s Luxo lamp is shining brighter than ever.

Up opens in cinemas around Australia on September 3.
You can view the Up movie trailer here on TheVine.