For a long time the Japanese had a lock on mature animated filmmaking, treating the form as just that - another form to complement documentary, wide-screen or any other storytelling technique imaginable. Pixar certainly wasn't the first, but it's proving to be the best collective of animators currently working, and one that's not afraid of the associations that come with labels like "animated" or "children's film". Like the crossover anime movement of the '80s, Pixar is carrying out a mission to make it clear that cartoons can say something important.

Few studios have so consistently created stories that speak to all ages and regions through characters (unreal though they be) as complex and resonant as Pixar over the last decade or so. It's the Hammer Horror of animation for the '00s. As the one major Hollywood studio audiences can count on to give them sensitive, funny, beautiful films suitable for all that don't teeter over into pandering nonsense, Pixar continues its task with the literally buoyant Up.

Carl (Ed Asner, in fine Lou Grant crank form) is a retired balloon salesman and widower, holing up in his house, wallowing in a deadening cocktail of nostalgia and sorrow. Carl is his neighborhood's sole holdout. Everyone else took the big bucks for their houses, and so he's alone amid the surrounding new high-rises. After being threatened with forceful removal to a retirement home because of an altercation with a construction worker, Carl decides he's going to honor his dead wife Ellie's dream of seeing Paradise Falls in South America. Out come the balloons and off Carl sails into the wild blue yonder.

But Carl isn't alone. Well after launch he finds a stowaway on his porch. Russell (Jordan Nagai) is an ebullient boy scout (actually a Wilderness Explorer) determined to help an old person do something - anything - in order to earn his last merit badge and do his father proud. He comes back to Carl's after running a bogus errand and gets trapped on the journey. A child of divorce, Russell is possessed of a nearly boundless optimism that's peppered with a sad wisdom beyond his years. He sets Carl on a path toward closure, and Carl fills a glaring hole in Russell's youth.

Attaching thousands of helium-filled balloons to a house and flying away? Of course it's silly, but Up is a "What if?" type fantasy of epic proportions with an intimate core. There is little question of reality or unreality because that's not the point. Writers Peter Docter and Bob Peterson's script is one full of wry, incisive observations of how we allow ourselves to live in the past, fear the unknown and that adventure is often closer to home than we think. A glittering example of the damage that can come from that sort of thinking is Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), an explorer and childhood hero of Carl's. Muntz is so wrapped up in past glory he's reduced himself to an embittered has been. It's a simple message, one that's been stated a thousand times, but rarely with such unfettered clarity and vivaciousness.

Up is bristling with a clever, subtle sense of humor that never goes overboard with irony and self-consciousness (I'm talking to you, Shrek), pulling its inspiration from a more timeless set of cultural references. Really, do dog jokes ever go out of style? The loyal mutt Dug (voiced by co-writer Peterson, Finding Nemo) is one of the most creatively symbolic characters to grace screens in a while, and though he's the so-called dumb one, his eventual investigation of his own blind devotion to the pack is one of the film's highlights. On a side note: the cone of shame is hilarious.

Without strong, empathetic characters (yes, like Dug) Up would be half the film it is. We learn of Carl's devoted but childless marriage to Ellie in a (occasionally heartbreaking) montage that relays the emotional connection between the two as clearly as any acted couple past or present. It's the little details that director Docter (Monsters Inc, WALL-E's original story writer) revels in that make Carl and Ellie's lifelong relationship and personalities of each so vivid. It would be easy to have made Russell a precocious post-modern pre-teen. Instead, Up has given us a kid that's as contemporary as he needs to be ("It's a talking dog!" he scolds Carl in an attempt to keep Dug) while capturing the qualities that make little kids just that. In the world after Juno, Russell is charmingly old-fashioned.

Up is also easily the strongest entry into the 3D sweepstakes of the last few years. The film's art is, unsurprisingly, impeccable. The robust color palette and carefully constructed compositions do their parts to tell the story in any dimension. In 3D it's that much ... more, and never becomes distracting. It just brings more finesse to Up's world. The "flying house movie" a lot of us scoffed at early on is one of the year's best so far.

Up opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 08/01/2009 page4)