"Up"
Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
Rated PG
(Three and one half stars)

“Up,” Pixar Studio’s latest animated feature, almost collapses under the weight of plot exposition before it even has a chance to get started.

The film opens with a long montage that follows the arc of Carl Fredricksen’s (voiced by Ed Asner) life from a young boy devoted to the exploits of famed explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), to an aged widower consigned to a walker and a breakfast of bran flakes.

It’s a warm and fuzzy piece of filmmaking, sketching his quiet but happy marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Ellie (Elie Docter)—but it’s just not very entertaining.]

Then there’s a knock on Mr. Fredricksen’s door.

Enter Russell (Jordan Nagai), an ambitious young Wilderness Explorer bent on assisting the unsuspecting—and in this case unappreciative—elderly in order to earn a coveted merit badge.

But young Russell has chosen a fateful moment to enter Mr. Fredricksen’s life. Mr. Fredricksen is about to be evicted and forced into a retirement home. He decides instead to make one bold act in an otherwise timid life and fulfill a promise he made years ago to Ellie: to provide her a house on top of Paradise Falls deep in the South American jungle.

Mr. Fredrickson ties about a thousand helium balloons to his house and literally pops it off its foundation. What he doesn’t realize is that he has a terrified Russell clinging to his porch.

Once the house begins to float over the city, the film wakes up and finds its voice. “Up” is an effort on par with Pixar’s long list of animation masterpieces, but it is, at the same time, a very different style of storytelling.

Forsaking the busy, populated landscapes of “Ratatouille” or “Cars,” the film is stripped down to a small cast making their way across lonely landscapes. And somehow it just works.

The sight of Mr. Fredricksen’s little house with its sprightly mosaic of balloons drifting into a thundercloud has an emotional grandeur worthy of Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away,” “Ponyo”).

At its heart, “Up” shares with its Pixar siblings a commitment to showing the viewer a good time. But around its edges it manages to gather hints of the surreal and the mythic—and it wears them very well. Watching Mr. Fredricksen and Russell sometimes ride and sometimes drag the house on their quest to fulfill the old man’s promise, one gets the feeling the filmmakers mixed together equal parts “Danny Deckchair,” “Alice in Wonderland” and the myth of Sisyphus.

Whatever its other ambitions, “Up” never loses a grip on its sense of humor. Pixar is as much a writer’s studio as it is an animation studio and the jokes are wickedly sharp. I’ve never seen a film get so many laughs out of a single word (“squirrel!”).

Mr. Fredricksen and Russell land in the South American jungle only to find their efforts complicated by the few characters they meet there. Russell befriends a large, colorful bird he names Kevin and they also bump into a dog (Bob Peterson) whose ability to talk is yet another of the inventive tricks the screenwriters have up their sleeves.

“Up’s” animators find a lot of physical humor in the mismatched energy of Russell and Mr. Fredricksen and the fact that they are both literally tethered to the same house. Mr. Fredricksen’s single-minded pursuit of his promise keeps getting yanked off course by Russell’s latest enthusiasm. The house binds the two together but also highlights their differences and the charming chemistry of their friendship.

Mr. Fredricksen finds out what happened to his childhood hero, Charles Muntz, and the revelation forces him to make hard choices about what is truly important.

In the end, “Up” accomplishes what Pixar Studios does best: it mixes sweetness and humor into a satisfying confection that avoids being overpowered by its saccharin impulses. But “Up” does something else as well. It takes a dive into the shadows of the subconscious—ever so slight but nonetheless satisfying—to create a story that stays with you a little longer than children’s films normally do.

"Up" plays at the Admiral Theater, 2343 California Ave. S.W., through Sept. 24.