If you want a nice, fluffy, happy animated narrative, then the key to that often involves including something not so nice or fluffy. Like infertility and death.
Anyway, the thought process behind Up’s tear-jerking montage is to get you engaged with the film’s central character. You wouldn’t feel as much connection with the dude if you didn’t see him go through some suffering first. Like Odysseus or any Greek tragedy play worth its salt, you’ve gotta watch a character go through some heavy shiz to get to that emotional catharsis. Odysseus was a bit of an a-hole though. He didn’t need to shout at Polythemus or tie himself to a ship and risk death, among various other shenanigans. Carl Fredricksen though, not so much of an a-hole. He’s just a grumpy man who’s suffered a significant loss in his life, and is still reeling from the hole left behind.
The montage, which tracks Carl’s life with Ellie, was apparently conceived as a wordless montage in the fashion of Polaroid home movies. And you know me, I’m a fine appreciator of any cinematic sequence that requires emphasis on non-verbal techniques to create narrative meaning. It’s interesting to note that an early draft of the previous scene where Carl and Ellie’s first meeting involved Ellie punching Carl in the face after he tried to catch a bird, exclaiming about animal rights, which then evolved into the two playing a slapping game which amused the creators, with Ellie giving Carl a feeble slap on her deathbed. This didn’t gel with test audiences though, so the sad ending was used instead. The scene in which Ellie learns she is infertile also received a lot of scrutiny before it made it to the final cut, with some staff feeling the moment was too intense. Although initially not included, it was eventually kept in the final version of the film. Director Pete Doctor noted how ‘You didn’t feel as deeply [without the scene] – not only just [with] that sequence, but through the whole film. Most of the emotional stuff is not just to push on people and make them cry, but for some greater reason to really make you care about the story’. Again, you need the sadness to achieve that emotional catharsis in the subsequent narrative.
Much thought was also put into the montage’s emotional timbre in terms of the music too. ‘Married Life’, the name of the song that runs throughout the sequence, was the first song that composer Michael Giacchino was tasked with creating, with Doctor asking for a song with the same feel as one played from his grandfather’s music box. And the music works a treat. The way it slows when Ellie miscarries, when Carl looks at the jar realises he and Ellie haven’t travelled to Ellie’s dream destination of Paradise Falls yet, each beat is perfectly orchestrated. The Guardian described the sequence as a ‘masterclass in narrative exposition’, and The Telegraph praised its daring decision to ‘risk alienating’ the audience early on with its downbeat subject matter. Giacchino deservedly went on to receive the Oscar for Best Original Score, having helmed one of Pixar’s standout emotional belters.