Film Analysis, Married Life from Up

Married Life from Up

Pixar holds a very special place in my heart with all their movies (excluding Cars 2, nobody actually likes that movie). From Toy Story to Finding Dory Pixar’s movies will always make me feel just like a kid again. One of the movies that rises to the top is Up, and there is one specific scene that everyone knows about, the scene that makes everyone cry.

This scene is only four and a half minutes long and has absolutely zero dialogue which is what I find most impressive; to have this immense effect on people all through music and filming is something that’s really worth analyzing. The music in this scene is amazing, it interacts with what’s going on in the scene all down to the rising and falling of the balloon stand with the rising and falling of the notes. Without the music the scene isn’t as powerful but listening to the music alone brings back all of the imagery for the scene and you can pinpoint every critical moment in the scene from the key changes and different moods in the music. Music brings many things to life and especially movies, I love movie soundtracks and they can easily make or break a movie. This scene is no exception, the music makes this part so much more emotional than it already is.

The angles and filming of this scene are very important and always show Ellie and Carl together. The two-shots that happen are very critical, it puts the two main characters side by side for the whole time until Ellie passes. This style solidifies there marriage and is a super strong part of this scene as this scene covers 70 years of their lives and emphasis’s how close they were. There are also running motifs with the balloons, the chairs, and the hill with the tree also help convey their feelings for each other and how they were there through thick and thin. There is one very specific shot I want to focus on. At one of the major turning points of this scene they use a lateral tracking shot. This shot passes from the two painting the nursery to the two with a doctor breaking bad news. Using intuition and the posters on the wall you can put together what had happened without any dialogue and that’s why I love this scene. One of my favorite film analyzers Every Frame a Painting talks about the lateral tracking shot and how hard it is to use successfully and uses this scene as an example. He says “This is a perfect example of where the lateral move is exactly right. Being further away from the characters makes this moment that much sadder, because we can’t help them. Moving left to right implies that time has passed and we can never go back.” This quote really ingrained itself in my head when I had heard it first and he’s right. This is one of the saddest parts of this scene and there is no going back to help, you have to live with what has happened. There are also some little things that I like a lot. The first time they climb the hill its the beginning of spring, everything is bright green, and at the end its fall and the trees and grass are brown and starting to die. Even though it’s fairly direct symbolism I still appreciate the little things like this. The framing and angles of this scene really makes this part a whole lot deeper. Every little detail is done for a reason and makes us feel a certain way even if we don’t notice it.

Pixar nailed it with this scene and there’s probably a lot more I could go on about this part and the entire movie as a whole. There are so many little things that directors can do to make the movie come alive and the different layers every department adds to it to makes the film what it is, every department is completely necessary. With the quality of animation that has come up recently in the past decade or so soon it’ll be hard to differentiate animation from real life. Over all Pixar has some of the deepest movies and this scene is really definitive of Pixars skills when it comes to how they can really make people feel.

Doctor, P. (Director). (2013). Up [Motion picture on DVD]. Milano: Walt Disney studios home entertainment

T. (Director). (2014, May 16). Wolf Children (2012) – The Lateral Tracking Shot [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdSKot0psNg&t=4s