Sometimes we watch old movies that we missed or ignored when they first came out. It was this way with the acclaimed Pixar offering, Up. We watched it on Disney+ a couple of nights ago – followed by some shorts of Dug Days.
If you haven’t seen Up, I’ll tell you about it in generalities. It’s a love poem, I think – a story of two pre-adolescents, Ellie and Carl, who bond over their dream of a great adventure to South America. Their goal is to record that adventure in Ellie’s scrapbook. They grow up, marry, work and save their money.
As in our own lives, the money they save goes into car repairs, health issues, and so on. They get old, and one day, Ellie dies. Carl is left alone. Okay, the story, like real life, includes some sadness.
Carl eventually gets to have the adventure that he and Ellie had planned only not in exactly the way they had imagined. Along the way, Carl makes friends with an Explorer scout, Russell, who needs one more service badge to advance to the next level. He also makes friends with a dog whose name is Dug, and a very rare bird that Russell names Kevin.
Carl, Russell, and Dug eventually return to America, and Carl finds himself perusing Ellie’s scrapbook that has become a photo album that documents Ellie and Carl’s life together – the real adventure. As I said, it’s a love poem of a sort.