Up

Up is the tale of Carl Fredricksen, an elderly man who as a child dreamed of becoming an explorer and who finally realises his ambition in his latter years. The film sensitively and gently presents the dreams and disappointments that make up most of our lives while it also finds sage humour in the incongruity of a pensioner embarking of a jungle adventure. While the world is forever conspiring to trip up Carl (who, short and stout and strong, looks like an older Norman Mailer), we're left in no doubt as to value of his wisdom and experience.

The film is co-directed by Pixar stalwarts Pete Docter and Bob Peterson and, like Wall-E before it, knows the value of silence as well as the need for souped-up action episodes to keep the little ones awake. Early on, there's a brilliant, tear-jerking chapter, free of dialogue, that runs through Carl's life from boyhood to dotage. From there, the story proper begins when doddery Carl is forced to leave his creaky wooden home as the modern city grows larger around him and the authorities threaten to place him in care. Carl's answer is to tie a thousand balloons to his home and float off in his house to South America to find the remote waterfalls that he and his late wife Ellie had always dreamed of visiting. In tow is Russell, a podgy child who inadvertently finds himself along for the ride: he's a Wilderness Explorer, a version of the Scouts, and has been hounding Carl to let him help the old man cross the road so that he can win his final achievement badge.

There's a touch of Fitzcarraldo as Carl and Russell have to drag the old man's home through the jungle in which they land while fighting off the maniacal ambitions of an even more elderly adventurer who lives in the wilderness. It's not the only element of Up that recalls Werner Herzog and that filmmaker's determination to show nature laughing in the face of man, and man trying vainly to do the opposite.

The film also amusingly tackles the curse of talking animals in movies: nothing with a beak or four legs speaks in this animated world. Almost nothing - there's a pack of dogs that possess electronic speaking collars controlled by their owner. When one device malfunctions, we're left with a brutish Doberman who talks with an effeminate whimper. It's a theme that runs throughout the film - that a dog is, well, just a dog. So we have mutts trained to serve food to guests of their master but who still can't resist swiping a hot dog from the table and munching it.

So, Pixar triumphs again with a delirious fantasy that has one leg in the real world of hopes dashed and realised and the other in the cartoon tradition of journeying and adventure. The crisp 3D is never gimmicky and the detail of the animation as loving as ever. Dave Calhoun