'Up' is Pixar at its most ambitious

SAN RAFAEL, CALIF. — The 100 or so Pixar Animation Studios employees had good reason to be giddy, and you could understand why they were more than a little nervous too. For more than four years, the animators, sound designers, editors and artists from every other Pixar department had plugged away on "Up" and on an early morning in April, they were finally about to see how their animated movie had turned out.

The movie itself -- Pixar's 10th animated film -- is narratively ambitious, a story about a 78-year-old widower's highly unusual road trip with a chubby young boy that, throughout its making, teetered on becoming sentimental and episodic. Although the movie is filled with comic bits, "Up" also features scenes of complex human emotion -- including the grief of a miscarriage -- that are rarely explored in family films. Parent studio Disney really needed the film to work commercially too: In earnings released last week, Disney's profit fell 46%, largely because of underperforming movies such as "Confessions of a Shopaholic" and "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience."

To add one more level of pressure to the Pixar team, just a few days before that April screening at George Lucas' bucolic Skywalker Ranch, the Cannes Film Festival had selected "Up" to launch this week's prestigious festival, a first for an animated film.

If producer Jonas Rivera and writer-director Pete Docter, two of Pixar's earliest employees, were sweating bullets when they introduced "Up" to their Pixar colleagues, they didn't show it. "This is the first time that we've got everything together," Rivera said. Added Docter just before the house lights dimmed: "Thank you guys for making the movie."

Despite all the end-of-the-journey gratitude, "Up," which premieres in Cannes on Wednesday and arrives in theaters May 29, wasn't quite finished.

As soon as the screening ended, Docter, Rivera, composer Michael Giacchino, executive producer John Lasseter and a dozen members of Pixar's brain trust met over lunch in a Skywalker conference room to discuss what they had just seen. By the time the team finished dessert, they had decided "Up" needed a new piece of music, and the choice they made with Giacchino revealed much about the film's creative ambitions.

As "Up's" poster and trailer make clear, the film's central image is a house, tethered to thousands of balloons, soaring into the sky. When septuagenarian Carl Fredricksen's (Ed Asner) residence took flight at the Skywalker screening, Giacchino's score was big and dramatic, the kind of music that typically accompanies an action sequence.