It's All About 'UP'
Up.
Let me tell you my story first before I write about the film. As soon as this animation film entered into the Top 20 of the IMDb ‘Top Films’ list, I decided to download the film in haste as I am kind of sucker towards films that are being rated so highly by the IMDb users. All that happened in June, when the film had just released and only its CAM print was available on the Internet. That was kind of a rough experience. Though the CAM print was more than bearable, it left me unsatisfied; I even blamed myself for disrespecting an animation film by watching it in one of the worst possible format of a film, the one recorded through a camcoder.
Few months later the film finally released in the DVD and Blu Ray, and I, as usual, set my eyes on downloading the staple 480p BDRip. Though at that time Rajeev Masand gave a DVD review of the film saying that the single disc edition shouldn’t fool its purchaser, since it had loads of extra features (about which I will write a little later) that bought good value for money.
Now, as cynical as it may sound, I decided to download the complete NTSC DVD-Image of the film – and so I did. After 10 days of continuous downloading, I finally got what I wanted – a DVD-Image, waiting to be burned on a standard 4.36 GB DVD. And oh boy, did I get exactly what I wanted? Much more than that! I had virtually everything at my disposal, the menu, ‘scene selection’ option, the ‘extra’ features - all of which Masand was talking about. It was as if I had purchased the Up DVD and was browsing it like anyone would after they have purchased a DVD for 500 bucks.
Needless to say, the experience was magnificent. But what made my enjoying the film even more was something which nobody would fully be able to understand since their knowledge is restricted in only appreciating the film, its plot, its character, but not what went behind its making. Since I had the privilege of accessing the ‘extra’ features of the DVD as well, I came to know about the amount of hard work that was put behind in the making the film.
There was this 20 minute documentary, which featured the interview of the director and all the creative thinkers that explained what made the film, especially its strikingly realistic imagery of ‘Paradise Falls’ in South America. Now, the complete background wasn’t made out of thin air, but it was a result of rather much meticulous attention to detail. ‘Paradise Falls’ is an imaginary name, yes, but its imagery isn’t. The complete crew of the film went to Venezuela in South America where they spent considerable time for their research. The ‘Paradise Falls’ and its surrounding canyons was an amalgamation of Angel falls and Tepui mountains. In Tepui, there was certain rock like structures that did resemble of that of a human face, an animal, or any shape you can imagine -- something which was incorporated in the film, when in one scene Mr. Fredrickson mistook a rock for a man. Or even the brief scene where Russell and Fredrickson struggle under a thunderstorm and the resultant incessant rainfall was inspired from what the crew experienced in their stay in Tapui. There were several other things that were incorporated. The Paradise Falls is, of course, an imitation of the Angel Falls, though the director told that he made it look a few hundred meters more steeper than the original Falls, which, by the way, is already the highest waterfall in the world.
The other contents in the DVD contained a cute, 10 minute animation clip, ‘Partly Cloudy’.
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