So my church has been doing an “At the Movies” series. On Sunday, September 17, the sermon was about Pixar’s 2009 Masterpiece Up.

Now, full disclosure: I can never watch the film’s famous opening sequence without crying. I think maybe I didn’t cry the first time, but I’ve seen it probably a dozen times since, and every time it’s like I got sprayed in the face with a garden hose. (Okay, maybe not quite that bad.) Those four-ish minutes (maybe six or seven if you count the exposition preceding it) are an incredibly powerful key, one that by itself can unlock the waterworks behind my eyeballs.

Even so, it hit harder this time. I’m only a young 39, but with each passing year I become more aware of the inevitable realities of aging and loss. I still have both parents and most of my aunts and uncles, but all four grandparents are gone, since this time three years ago my menagerie of animal companions has shrunken from five to two.

Having acknowledged these factors, I still find it odd that those few minutes of film have followed me around all week like an extremely vivid dream. Over the years, I’ve found that, when something refuses to leave my brain, there is often a lesson or truth that I’ve yet to extract and unpack. So I leaned in and embraced the feelings. It certainly made for an emotional week, but I’ve thought through it all enough to have settled my spirit a bit. I now feel like I’ve come to a bit of an understanding, so I’m going to share some reflections here.

The beauty of art – be it a painting, a song, a play, a movie, or anything else – is that it can affect different people in different ways. I think many can relate to what I’m about to type here, but if you think I’m way off – that’s fine!

Much has been written about this film, a winner of multiple Oscars. The opening sequence is a masterpiece of concise storytelling, and has become such a cultural touchstone that it has its own Wikipedia article, separate from that about the film as a whole. (To further that point, there’s also an article specifically about the accolades the movie has received.)

So why am I doing this? Why become the billionth person to cover this topic online? Well, I have my own domain name; may as well use it for something, right? (I kid, I kid; music blogging will pick back up soon.) If I didn’t have my own website, this might well end up on the film’s Wild Mass Guessing page on TVTropes. And maybe, hopefully, someone else can benefit from my reflections, as I have. Maybe not. Who knows? Anyway, here goes (spoiler alerts for those who have not seen an incredibly popular movie):

I read something once to the effect that the real reason the Up intro was so poignant is that we hear Ellie’s voice only when she is a child. So, essentially, the film’s creators spend the first couple minutes introducing us to a couple of cute little kids; less than ten minutes later, they kill off one of them.

While that writer had a point, I feel the explanation proffered was far too reductionist and simplistic. There are other factors at play here.

Yes, the fact that Carl and Ellie are introduced to us as little kids causes us to become more emotionally invested in them and their tale than we would be if we knew them only as adults. When you’re with somebody for the rest of your lives, it’s very important to know who they are today, but there’s also some value in knowing you they used to be. With Carl and Ellie that’s a given, and I think it only deepens the feeling for the audience. They know each other well and love each other a lot.

Yes, the brevity of the sequence, beautifully underscoring just how quickly life can pass by, makes a huge difference as well. So does the silence of the now-adult characters in that four-minute stretch; we see their mouths moving, yet the only sound comes from Michael Giacchino‘s bittersweet, endlessly adaptable waltz, appropriately titled “Married Life“.

Yet there are subtleties, little details in this seemingly simple story that bypass our intellect and go straight to our emotions, burrowing there with such rare skill that they may have to be gradually teased, years after our first viewing, out of our subconscious and into our thoughts.

Despite all the subtleties, the basic story told is simple. Childhood sweethearts marry and spend roughly fifty (mostly happy) years together. Not everything goes according to plan – they are unable to bear a child, and they can’t afford the adventurous trip-of-a-lifetime to Paradise Falls, the exotic locale to which their mutual childhood hero, explorer Charles Muntz (soon to become the film’s villain), long ago disappeared. However, they have each other. You find yourself thinking that they deserve better, yet they’re generally still happy. To paraphrase John Lennon (who himself was paraphrasing many other people), life is what happens while you’re making other plans – and when their best-laid plans go awry (to paraphrase Robert Burns), they inevitably realize that their life together is more important than their plans. Their lives aren’t obviously extraordinary in terms of what they’re doing, but are happy and fulfilled and precious to them; in the end, they turn out to be extraordinary people living lives that are far more routine than what they had hoped…and they’re okay with that. Finally, Ellie – the energetic, charismatic spark plug of the two – gets sick and dies, just as Carl is about to surprise her with tickets for a trip to finally visit Paradise Falls.

One of the genius aspects of this, I think, is that we get to know Carl and Ellie just enough to love them and identify them. Ellie in particular may remind us of a friend, a parent, a grandparent, or someone else we’ve known in our lives, but director Pete Doctor (whose daughter, Elizabeth, then a preteen, was both the namesake and the speaking voice of the character) somehow manages to tell us a lot about her character while keeping her vague enough that we can see her as just about any spirited woman we’ve known. Carl is established as more of a steady, stoic person, deeply in love with and devoted to his wife from the night they first met as small children. When she dies, you don’t just understand his devastation – you feel his devastation, almost as if you were actually losing that loved one in your mind.

Presented with a few personality traits and an all-too-brief glimpse of their life together, we are left to fill in the details with our own pre-existing knowledge. Had we gotten to know them in excruciating detail, that real-life applicability may well have dissipated.

Put another way: Carl and Ellie had friends through their job at the zoo. They had neighbors, at least before that blasted real-estate developer started trying to turn their neighborhood into a high-rise. They no doubt had a favorite restaurant or two. They argued and disagreed at times. Though they didn’t get to go to Angel Falls together, they most likely traveled somewhat, if only for their honeymoon. Yet we don’t see those details: we are informed only of what we are supposed to know.

And what we’re supposed to know is…incredibly true-to-life. Every event that changed Carl and Ellie’s life together, for better or worse, could happen to any couple – in the ’50s and ’60s when they were young, in 2009 when the movie was released, or today in 2023. Good things happen. Bad things happen. People get injured, get old, get sick, die. People change. The world changes. New widows and widowers can be overwhelmed with grief and guilt and loneliness, especially if the one who died was also the one who had coaxed them out of their shell, which certainly applies with the vivacious Ellie and the reserved Carl. It can lead to someone withdrawing from society, even if they (like Carl) have a sharp mind and no physical health problems beyond the stiff joints, nearsightedness, and hearing issues common to old age. It hits home because it’s realistic; it makes you realize that everyone has a story. The elderly were young once; heck, the oldest living person on the planet was once, if only for a fraction of a second, the youngest living person on the planet. Everyone has hopes and dreams – and when today’s elderly folks were young, their hopes and dreams were probably fairly similar to ours, adjusting for societal, technological, and environmental changes. Everyone has to choose which dreams and goals to hold onto and which to let go and which to adapt to their current circumstances, as life restricts their window of what is feasible. (Carl will have to make a similar decision in a more literal sense later in the movie.)

Our expectations are also subverted in seeing the more outgoing, energetic one die while the other remains. As I’ll touch on later, Ellie as both a child and a young adult was almost literally bursting with life – yet it was Carl, steady and cautious, who would be the longer-lived of the two. Sometimes life works that way. Sometimes it doesn’t, but sometimes it does. All of us have known someone in Carl’s shoes – someone who has recently lost a spouse, parent, sibling, close friend or, God forbid, even a child. Public Service Announcement incoming: they, perhaps more than anyone else, need a reminder that they’re still loved, and are still valuable members of society.

I think the things below the surface, though, do a lot of the heavy lifting in making the story stick. For instance, they change over time, not just physically but in their demeanors as well.

As a child and young adult, Ellie is hyperactive, point-blank. She’s so full of energy and ideas and adventurousness that she has a difficult time showing any kind of emotional restraint. She’s practically bouncing like a ball while she waits for the wedding photographer to finish so she can plant one on her new husband. We see it as they cloud-watch: Carl points out one cloud that looks like a baby, and suddenly all the clouds look like babies. Ellie is the kind of person who can become so enthralled with an idea that it becomes almost impossible for her to focus on anything else. Even at age 39, that is me to a tee, so I definitely found her relatable.

Her character changes after it’s shown she can’t have children. What exactly the issue is, we don’t know – again, we are shown only what we are meant to know.

The most extraordinary scene, at least for me, takes place right after that fateful trip to the doctor’s office. Ellie sits in the backyard, still, heartbroken, overcome with grief – and yet, at the same time, there’s such a sense of…dignity to her.

Carl doesn’t love or respect Ellie any less after this; Ellie doesn’t love or respect Carl any less either. Leaning on each other, the two recover from the tragedy. With parenthood not attainable, Paradise Falls becomes the goal. Ellie is once more energetic, imaginative, optimistic. Yet she is different now: more measured, more patient, wiser, more grounded. While not shy, she has become less of a motormouth. That quiet dignity, so evident in her lowest moment, subtly gains a steady presence as she enters middle age, and it only increases with time. Sometimes in life, the hardest experiences teach us the most. We come out of them with our integrity and basic character intact, yes; yet we are permanently changed. We have been forced to grow up somewhat. Often times, we end up having become better people – wiser, more balanced, more thoughtful. This seems to have happened with Ellie here.

Another subtlety is in the adjustment of goals as life changes. Going from trying to have a kid, to trying to go to Paradise Falls, to simply trying to enjoy their time together is the most obvious. The foreshadowing, I must say, is impressive: all these goals will be fulfilled, even those that have fallen by the wayside. Yet the first two won’t happen until after Ellie’s death: Carl will finally travel to Paradise Falls via a physics-defying bundle of helium balloons, and he will become the closest thing to a father in young Russell’s life. Even Ellie’s humorous painting, of their house on the edge of the falls, comes to pass (albeit without the knowledge of any of the characters).

Something else that, on reflection, probably makes this little tableau a bit more special to me is that it has some parallels to It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a much older cultural touchstone than Up, but both feature childhood friends who marry and ultimately pass up lifelong dreams to remain in their hometown and deal with more important (or at least pressing) matters. Both feature an abandoned house that plays a key part in the beginning of their relationship; both feature them renovating and moving into that abandoned house right after getting married. Both feature characters who are passionate about traveling and seeing the world. In another ingenious subversion, it’s the wife, Ellie, who plays the part of the George Bailey-esque dreamer, and we find ourselves thinking the movie is about her. Then, poof! – she’s gone.

It’s a Wonderful Life and Up are on a very short list of films that can reliably move me to tears, so those parallels probably hopped into my subconscious pretty quickly, using the emotional impact of the older movie to heighten the impact of the newer.

Carl and Ellie were both, in their own ways, unconventional people, especially for the time in which they came of age. They would both have been misfits, somewhat – he for being too quiet, she for being not quiet enough. Yet as long as they could be misfits together, they were perfectly content. During the early Cold War, when most jobs tended to be either factory or office, they took a third way and worked outdoors at their local zoo. Ellie wasn’t afraid to be forceful in a time when women were generally expected to be demure. They made and lost multiple plans, but the whole time, they were both adventurers in their own way.

In life, you try and try to hang on to your optimism and imagination and sense of wonder, as good things happen and bad things happen and you suffer loss and age and grief and you become older and wiser. You can’t be resistant to change but you can’t allow your integrity to be swept away in the sands of time. Carl and Ellie were true to themselves and to each other throughout it all; were they real people, they would be truly remarkable despite being unable to achieve their grand ambitions. Again, a lot like in It’s a Wonderful Life.

I guess that’s about it. Brilliant film, weirdly emotional Matt, with his over-analytical should’ve-been-a-lawyer-but-can’t-concentr…-SQUIRREL!!!!! brain, trying to understand his own emotions. This is where I’ll sign off for now; till next time, remember: adventure is out there!