Point of Contention: The public showing of the opening sequence of Up should be considered a form of emotional abuse, mainly for children, but the cruelty of the film makers leaves lasting emotional and psychological trauma on the human psyche. Supporting Fact 1: There is no need to go into Ellie and Carls relationships past in such graphic detail. The major points of the movie could have easily been made by either narration or flashback sequences. While they may not have been the resounding emotional climax that was present, the overall message (of living up to promises made of our dearly departed) could have easily been made without *all* the details given. SF 2: If one is to assume that the movie couldnt make the points mentioned above without the opening sequence, the sequence itself would still be possess great emotional impact without the inclusion of their attempts to have a child. This leads to the crux of the discussion at hand: The inclusion of the couples stillborn or failed attempts for conception is completely gratuitous. There is no need to show us a scene of the couple happily painting a nursery followed immediately by the scene in the hospital, with Ellie weeping into her hands while Carl stands behind, his posture screaming of loss and misery. SF 3: The dichotomy present between the two scenes mentioned in SF 2 is deliberately jarring and brutal. In the first, we see a brightly lit nursery, and the entire scene possess a joy and celebration of life, scene in the mural being painted by Ellie, of a stork delivering a baby over a kaleidoscope landscape of abstract shapes that merge and blur together in their almost garish display of contrasting and complimenting colors. Carl is setting up a mobile, made entirely of dirigibles like the ones he and Ellie used to dream/ talk about. The door and light switch both deviate from the normal whtie/beige color and land decidedly in the pink section of the color spectrum. Lets examine the following scene: the lighting is muted, and all the color has been bleached out. Everything is in shades of gray. The camera shifts to the image mentioned in SF 2, with Ellie sitting and weeping as Carl leans over her, evoking imagery of a mother bird sheltering its chicks from a raging storm. But there is no rain, nor lightning, nor wind, nor anything corporeally manifest that Carl could use his body to shelter Ellie from. There is only the gut wrenching ache of a loved one lost, gone before they ever had a chance to begin. SF 4: Even as the movie attempts to alleviate the emotional trauma it leveled on the audience, with Carl convincing Ellie to start saving so they could go to South America, the director and writers have not finished their despicable work. Just as we begin to recover, and have hope build once more in our collective souls that this might just work out for these two, that they could go and fulfill the dream they had had since they were naught but children, Pixar strikes again, burying the dagger of heartache and sorrow directly into the audiences gut. We see Carl get the plane tickets, plan out the reveal to his beloved wife on the hill where there first dream blossomed (having children), only to watcher her fall and rise, only to fall again, this time unable to regain her feet. The last image we have of the two of them together is Carl kissing her head, as her hand gets lower and lower, slipping away from his, just as she slips away from him. To bring the abuse full circle, we also see Ellie reading over the book in which they planned all of their hopes, only to have them crushed by a cruel and uncaring writer, with Carl sending a twig sailing into the book, just as he did when they were children. Our parting image is of Carl, returning home alone. The only thing with him as the sun sets on his house is a blue balloon, reminding us all of the person who should have been holding his hand. Balloons are usually in the jurisdiction of children, and we (the audience) can feel the knife in our gut wrench sideways and down, and all hope and joy within pours out, leaving us emotionally drained and sickened. It is for these reasons that I can state, quite definitively, that Pixars opening sequence of Up is gratuitously abusive towards the audiences emotional state, rendering us without even the hope of joy, for how can anything ever be right once such wrong has been endured?
Posted on: Sun, 06 Jul 2014 14:39:52 +0000
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