UP

[dubman]

I liked it a lot! It's what i expected out of Pixar by now, which is basically something wonderful and amazing, but since the previews gave very little of any plot away, i felt as if i was going to be led into a very different kind of movie. maybe simple, slice-of-life (with one fantastical twist) kind of movie, maybe with "Straight Story" kind of vibes. certainly something that didnt feature an extremely rushed villain with zero dimension to muck it up with pointless adversity. you could even tell how much they could have gone into his character as opposed to excusing his sudden turn by being "already crazy." russel and carl are great together though, and the less complicated the movie was the more enjoyable it was. the alpha dog's voice was a great touch to diffuse a lot of the real menace out of a generally sweet movie like this, and a lot of the details like russel's confusion at his absent dad and the dogs' sudden turn around (because theres no such thing as an inherently bad domesticated dog) were very thoughtful. it felt like a very extended short, and one that was much better than the piss-poor one they gave us that the beginning of this one.

kinda in the lower half of pixar movies for me, but still the yearly highlight.

[King of Snake]

agreed about the villain thing. That part of the movie didn't feel very well thought out IMO. It also sorta negates some of the effort they go to to show Carl as this frail old man who can barely walk without his stick, by having him running and jumping around like a 20-year old for much of the finale of the film. Also, I don't think it was ever explained why the villain guy had all these "intelligent" dogs. It was fun to have the dogs talk trough their collars, but then they were also flying airplanes...?? That seemed a bit random to me.
Still great fun overall though and all the other characters were great (esp Dug the dog and the crazy bird)