May 2009

Newsletter SMS Alerts Version française
FIND A THEATRE FIND A MOVIE FIND IN STORE

Site Navigation

  1. Theatres
  2. Movies
  3. Events
  4. Buy Tickets
  5. Blog
  6. Video
  7. Contests
  8. Corporate Sales
  9. SCENE.ca
  10. DVD Store
 

May 2009 

Return to Table of Contents May 2009

Up_MAIN_may09.jpg

Cover Story: Pete Docter
Going Up

Sitting at their desks and drawing palm fronds just wasn’t good enough for the artists at Pixar. So they got on a plane and went to South America to see those palm fronds…and exotic birds…and remote mountaintops first-hand. Director Pete Docter tells us about the trip


By Marni Weisz

You’d think scouting locations would be the one thing you wouldn’t have to worry about when making an animated film. You’d be wrong. At least when you’re talking about a Pixar movie.


The groundbreaking animation studio’s latest, Up, follows a grumpy old man and his painfully enthusiastic eight-year-old neighbour from a congested downtown core to the surreal jungle and rocky vistas of remote South America — a stormy journey they make via a balloon-powered house, but more on that later.

 


Pete Docter

And as director Pete Docter explains, getting the urban part right was easy enough, but there was only so much they could glean about South America from looking at photographs and watching documentaries.

 

“We were getting this foggy sense of what it’s like,” Docter explains over the phone from California. “It’s probably similar to when you come back from some exotic place and you show friends photos of your vacation, there’s only so much you can convey with photographs.”


Docter, whose Pixar credits include supervising animator and story artist on Toy Story, directing Monsters, Inc. and coming up with the original story idea for WALL•E, is in a car being driven by his editor down a California highway. They’re on their way from George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch — where they spent the morning mixing the final reel of Up — back to Pixar’s office an hour away. “It’s supposed to be done by the end of this week,” Docter says of Up. “It’s hard to believe it will ever be over, it’s been five years on this picture for me.”

 

Concerned that the real South America just wasn’t coming through those photographs and documentaries, in September of 2006 Docter took a team of about 10 writers and animators to Venezuela to experience the jungle first-hand. “When you got there it was the smells, the feeling of it, you could see things up close, take pictures, do watercolour sketches and make all sorts of notes for ourselves so that we could capture more accurately the feeling of the place.”


But if you’re imagining a bunch of artists sitting on little stools at a resort, sipping from coconuts and sketching the well-manicured flora, you don’t understand these guys. They headed straight for a remote locale called Triple Point, where Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela meet in a spray of a hundred mountains, more than half of which, says Docter, have never been touched by man.


“It took us three days just to get to one,” he recalls. “We hiked up and we camped up there, because to get down, we wouldn’t have been able to even make it before nightfall…. Then we arranged for a helicopter to pick us up and take us to an even more remote, inaccessible one. I think they said you can hike up it but it would take a week and a half, so we opted for the helicopter [laughs].



Russell and Carl in Up
 “And the tops of these things are pretty volatile in terms of the weather,” Docter continues. “So it’ll be sunny and you’re in shorts and a T-shirt and then two minutes later it’ll be a downpour.”

 

Which is exactly what happened when a quick-moving storm stranded half of the Pixar group at the top of a mountain — the helicopter simply couldn’t pick them up. “So there were a couple of hours where we thought these guys are going to be stuck on top of this mountain where very few people have ever been in the history of mankind,” recalls Docter. “But luckily in the end there was a small opening in the clouds and the helicopter was able to go back in and pick up the second group.”

 

So was the trip absolutely necessary, or just a way for a bunch of creative types to finagle a free vacation out of their employers? “I think without that trip it would be more of us making things up, and to be honest we did make a lot of things up,” says Docter.

 

“But there are a lot of [plants] that are pulled right out of what we saw down there and I think there’s a little bit more groundedness because of that.”


And grounding a film is necessary when dealing with such an absurd concept. Up tells the story of Carl Fredricksen (who’s voiced by Ed Asner), a timid balloon salesman who falls in love with, and marries, an adventurous woman. They spend their next 60 years dreaming of a trip to South America, but life slips by, the couple grows old, and soon enough Carl’s wife is no longer around. Now 78, Carl simply wants to live out his remaining years in the house they shared, which requires fighting off an aggressive developer’s attempts to buy him out. After a heartbreaking accident, Carl is deemed a danger and told he must move to an old folks home. So, he ties thousands of brilliantly coloured helium balloons to his house and lifts off — heading for South America. 


Of course, every adventure-movie star needs a foil. Enter Russell (Jordan Nagai), the eight-year-old Wilderness Explorer (similar to a Boy Scout) who happens to be on Carl’s front porch when the house breaks free. Together, Carl and Russell fly to South America, where à la The Wizard of Oz the film shifts from a housebound drama to a far-out thriller involving a 13-foot-high flightless bird, talking dogs and a long-lost explorer (Christopher Plummer).

 

Before being released (in 3D where available) in North America on May 29th, on May 13th Up will become the very first animated movie to open the prestigious Cannes film festival. “That was a shock for me,” says Docter. “I thought we were just screening the film so that hopefully we could be included somewhere. So the fact that it was opening — wow.”


But maybe Cannes’ acceptance of an animated film shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, Pixar’s last two movies, 2007’s Ratatouille and last year’s WALL•E were among the best-reviewed films of their respective years, each earning an astounding 96% on the popular Rotten Tomatoes website, which surveys hundreds of professional reviews to create an average score.


Docter thinks the Cannes honour may also relate to Pixar’s refusal to be pigeonholed by its methods. “We’ve always looked at the films we do at Pixar as just films, not necessarily animated,” says Docter. “We happen to use animation, that’s the medium, but we try to tell the strongest stories that we possibly can and I think the results are born out in those films.”

 

Having finally arrived back at Pixar, Docter contemplates his first trip to Cannes as he walks down the hall. “I don’t have any delusions that anyone will know who I am or anything,” says the man who’s had a hand in some of the biggest movies of the past 15 years. “It’s a star-studded place. But I think it’ll be fun just to attend and watch the movie with the crowd…. It’s an audience of film lovers and to be in that same group that welcomed Hitchcock and all those guys, it’s really incredible.”

 

Marni Weisz is the editor of Famous.

 


John Ratzenberger with The Incredibles' Underminer

Who’s Ratzenberger this time?

Best known as barfly Cliff from TV’s Cheers, John Ratzenberger is the only actor to voice a character in every single Pixar feature. This time, listen for Ratzenberger as the voice of Tom the construction foreman early on in Up. Here’s his Pixography:

Hamm in Toy Story (1995)  
P.T. Flea in A Bug’s Life (1998)
Hamm in Toy Story 2 (1999)
The Abominable Snowman in Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Fish School in Finding Nemo (2003)
Underminer in The Incredibles (2004)
Mack in Cars (2006)
Mustafa in Ratatouille (2007)
John in WALL•E (2008)
Tom in Up (2009)

 



  1. Top Movies and Events

  2. More at Cineplex.com

  3. In The DVD Store

  4. Escape Wth Us!

    As the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada, Cineplex Entertainment operates 130 theatres with 1,347 screens serving more than 70 million guests annually. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Cineplex Entertainment operates theatres from British Columbia to Quebec and is the largest exhibitor of digital, 3D and IMAX projection technologies in the country.