Pixar's Feature Up and Other Family Movies Depicting Flight Across the Globe

When it comes to fantasy in any media, the feeling of flight is usually the #1 daydream without much argument. Well, repair that last sentence with a "for kids" at the end. For adults, fantasy has become more than a bit more prurient. But even adults with a retained childhood imagination still get a kick out of the concept of being able to fly over the Earth at will and see things from a perspective we never could before. That's why Google Earth is so popular and creating obsessed fans when the basic version of the software is as free as the open air itself. It's no surprise then that Pixar and Disney picked up on the idea already several years ago to plan out a movie about flying over our planet. As with most movies about a journey in flight, though, it has to have a sense of realism--hence some kind of flying device, not surprisingly via a balloon.

Consider Pixar's upcoming "Up" to be one of the last movies done at Disney with a connection to one of the studio's original classic animators. Before he died in 2005, 97-year-old Disney animator/writer veteran Joe Grant gave script approval to "Up" as passing the Disney test of bringing fulfilling imagination to every age in the guise of trekking across the globe through the aid of balloons. Disney has obviously depicted elements of flight before in a lot of their classic animated and live-action movies. And most of the sequences that involved flight were more or less magical if sometimes complicated technical wizardry in the live-action department before the age of CGI.

Disney's classics of "Fantasia", "Peter Pan", "Absent-Minded Professor", "Mary Poppins", "Bedknobs and Broomsticks", "Escape to Witch Mountain", etc., all used elements of flying into the day or nighttime sky as a way to convey the beauty of our childhood dreams. In fact, just about every great movie or book for kids we can think of in our first breath used some kind of element of flight in the plot. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between just flying on our own and having a device to fly in.

The imagination always expands a little wider when a movie with a journey of flight involves that adventure in either a balloon or some other flying device. Usually the more crude the device (and having a group of people besides) adds more fun to the situation. During the era of Jules Verne, the only device that could be logically created for a similar plot was travel by balloon. Verne also depicted, in some cases accurately, a method for flying to the moon already in the 19^th century. For just a trek across the globe, though, it was a hot-air balloon packed full of anywhere from two to half-a-dozen people, either by accident or design.

Yes, we'll keep it clean from there.

When Hollywood decided to make a big-budget adaptation of Verne's classic "Around the World in 80 Days" in 1956, the adventure of traveling miles over terra firma in a balloon was given the big-screen treatment for the first time. This was the first story ever written that set the pattern of all sky travel adventures where landings occur along the way to encounter either a consortium of familiar character actors causing trouble for the protagonists, or discovering mythical creatures that don't get star billing. While that might have made this genre contrived later on when tastes became more sophisticated, Jules Verne brought a sense of magic to the idea of people traveling in a balloon or flying contraption.

Whatever that magic was and is perhaps comes down to the sky itself where there's as much mystery as the deepest regions of our oceans.
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As beautiful and poetic as the ocean is (and, yes, the travel adventure set underwater is a whole other appealing genre), the sky has an equal profundity to it--mainly because of its dangerous...well, terrain. Trying to navigate a flying device in our skies is as tricky as navigating a submarine owned by Captain Nemo. Of course, Phileas Fogg and Passepartout managed to navigate their own balloon by sheer will in "80 Days" in order to make Fogg's famous bet win out. Even though that brought on a lot of fun and unexpected situations with the parade of characters during stopovers in international locales, a journey through our skies with no sense of where one's going takes this genre a few steps forward in capturing an active imagination.

Two personal favorite family movies of mine give examples of how travelling through the air in a mechanical or fantastical device provides an appeal of the adventurous unknown. In both the book and excellent 1996 movie adaptation of Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach", we have a giant peach eventually taking flight with James and a cast of life-size creatures travailing unknown skies. Because there's always the danger of something going wrong in this unpredictable universe (particularly someone falling overboard), the adventure is enhanced tenfold if not already with the surreal aspect of giant creatures traveling with James.

In "James", the places visited aren't always a part of reality either. Despite the same arguably being said about "80 Days", one forgotten 1986 animated film from Claymation master Will Vinton managed to bring that aspect while blending a purpose to an adventure in the air.

"The Adventures of Mark Twain" obviously sounds like a generic movie about the life of Samuel Clemens from decades ago. This one, however, was the first Claymation feature ever made by the now defunct Will Vinton Studios and cleverly placed a Claymation version of Mark Twain into a mammoth flying device resembling a balloon. On board with him are Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Becky Thatcher as literary characters come to life to help convince their creator that flying to meet a personal destiny with Halley's Comet isn't a smart move. Along the way, we have an alternate universe adventure of seeing Twain's stories come to life while traveling through our skies.

If you have to compare Pixar's "Up" to anything, it'd have to be the above film--particularly with an elderly protagonist piloting the flying craft. For "Up", it's an old man named Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) enabling his house to fly over the Earth through the aid of plentiful balloons. Since Carl has a purpose to his flight down to South America as a tribute to his dead wife, we see another in this genre that gives an emotional reasoning to the flight--yet follows "Mark Twain" with forays into fantasy in real locations.

As in real life where you'll occasionally see similar independent air adventurers, Pixar will likely show the disparity between reality and fantasy in "Up." We'll nevertheless see proof that adventures in the air are where imaginations can thrive at their fullest level without having to worry about the age or kind of characters in the story to keep those with short attention spans attentive...

Sources:

http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/up/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088678/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048960/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116683/