Up (2009) Review — Those First 10 Minutes Are the Run-Up, Not the Peak

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Everything written about this film says the same thing about its first ten minutes, and I agree with all of it. Carl meets Ellie, marries her, breaks open the travel fund again and again, and buries her, without one line of dialogue. Michael Giacchino’s music and the pictures carry two entire lives between them. The sequence is exactly as good as its reputation.

Where I get off the bus is the sentence that usually comes next. That the opening is the peak, and nothing in the adventure afterwards reaches it. Those ten minutes are not a peak. They are a run-up. Everything stacked up in them becomes the chain bolting a 78-year-old man to his house, and the same memories become the run-up he needs to get the chain off. A normal film would put that sequence in its epilogue. This one opens with it.

📺 Where to Watch Up (August 2026)

Service	Status	Notes
Disney+	Streaming	Included with a subscription. Every Pixar feature sits on the same shelf
Amazon Prime Video	Rent or buy	Not included with a Prime membership
Apple TV	Rent or buy	Also carried by Fandango at Home, YouTube, Google Play
Hulu	Not available	Not in the Hulu catalogue. Disney+ carries it in the US
Netflix	Not available	Disney pulled its catalogue years ago

As of August 11, 2026, the only US subscription that includes Up is Disney+. Everything else on the list charges per title, so a Prime membership will not get you through the door on this one. Streaming rights move around constantly, so check the service’s own page before you subscribe for a single movie.

👉 If the part that gets you is working out what somebody meant to you only after they are gone, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End spends a thousand years on the same wound.

🎬 Trailer

📖 Synopsis – No Spoilers

A boy named Carl worships the explorer Charles Muntz. He meets a girl named Ellie who worships the same man, and the two of them promise each other that one day they will get to Paradise Falls, a place in South America neither has seen. They marry. They start a jar for the trip. The jar gets smashed open three times for things that are not the trip: a flat tire, a broken leg, a roof wrecked by a storm. On the day the tickets are finally in hand, Ellie collapses.

At 78, Carl lives alone in the house the two of them repaired together. The neighbourhood around it has already been flattened for redevelopment, and his front yard is now the middle of a construction site. The morning a court order is set to move him into a retirement home, he ties several thousand balloons to the chimney and leaves. What he does not know is that somebody is already standing on his porch. Russell is eight years old, a Wilderness Explorer, and one badge short of his next rank. The missing badge is for assisting the elderly.

✨ What Makes It Special

Why ten silent minutes work that hard

List what actually happens in the sequence and it sounds like nothing. A wedding. Two people fixing up a house. A picnic on a hill. A nursery being painted. A hospital. And a coin jar that gets broken open three times, every time for something other than the trip it was saving for. That loop by itself explains an entire life spent not going.

It lands because nothing is explained. Tell me in dialogue that this couple could not have children and I receive it as information. Instead the film shows me a room that was being prepared, then Ellie’s back as she sits in front of a doctor, then it moves on. I have to fill the gap myself. The second I fill it I am standing on their side of the story, which is why the hospital at the end of the sequence does not feel like a stranger’s death.

I suspect this plays differently when most of what you watch is animated in Japan. Ten minutes of held silence is not an unusual ask here. What is unusual is spending it on a marriage instead of on a landscape or a fight.

The shape language is just as deliberate. Carl is squares, Ellie is curves and balloon shapes, and that is Pete Docter’s own description of the design rule rather than a fan reading. Once you have it, the picture frames around the two of them and the chairs they sit in start reporting on their owners. A child takes the shapes in without noticing. An adult notices and has to put the drink down.

Carrying most of the ten minutes is Michael Giacchino’s score. “Married Life” is one waltz that starts at the giddy tempo of two people falling for each other and gets heavier by increments until it is something else entirely. It won Best Original Score at the 82nd Academy Awards, the same night the film took Best Animated Feature. Strip out the dialogue and something has to accept liability for explaining the story. Here it is the orchestra.

I know I am gushing. Stay with me, because the gushing is the argument.

What is tied to that house is not only balloons

Why does Carl refuse to leave with such violence? Why is flying the entire building away more reasonable to him than a retirement home? On paper it is nonsense. The moment you accept that the house is Ellie, every decision he makes lines up. The walls, the chair, the mailbox are all evidence that she was here. Handing the building over is a second funeral.

The Japanese title of this film is Carl the Old Man’s Flying House. A whole sentence where the English has one word, and somebody in marketing here clearly decided the audience needed to be told up front that a man and a house were involved. Clumsy. Also not wrong, because the house is the second lead.

Which is what makes the late sequence of Carl throwing his furniture out of the door hurt so much. Every object he drops is something he was holding. The climax of this film is not the fight in the air. It is thirty seconds of a man emptying his own living room. That is the first time he puts the past down on purpose.

The page he never turned

Ellie kept a handmade scrapbook from childhood with “My Adventure Book” on the cover, and inside it a page headed “Stuff I’m Going to Do”. Carl has never looked past that page. He is certain that what waits on the other side is a list of things she never got to have. Late in the film he turns it. I am not going to say what is there, only that one book flips the meaning of everything the film has spent an hour building.

🎭 Memorable Scenes

1. The balloons come up out of the chimney

Up to this point the screen has been nothing but cleared lots, cranes and grey sky. Then colour erupts from the roof, not all at once but in waves, the way something that has been held down finally gets out. A change of key delivered as one image with no explanation attached. Disney’s production notes put the count at 20,622 balloons for the lift-off, with a further 10,297 placed individually for the later flight sequences. The number is not really the point. The speed at which the colour arrives is.

2. Turning the page

The film has spent an hour carefully stacking up how much weight this man is carrying. He opens the page and the weight is still there, but it now means the reverse of what he thought. The worst part of the design is that the person correcting him is not around to be argued with.

3. The second departure

The first departure is the loud one with the balloons. That is a man escaping while still holding everything. The second one happens after he has already arrived, when saving Russell means carrying the furniture to the door one piece at a time. The quiet departure is the one that takes actual courage.

Adventure is out there!

Worth getting right, because it is misquoted constantly: the line is Charles Muntz’s. It is his sign-off in the newsreel Carl and Ellie watch as children, and Ellie is the one who picks it up and carries it for the rest of her life.

💭 How It Made Me Feel

I was not planning to cry at this film. The place it got me was not the opening montage everybody warns you about. It was later, once Russell has pulled Carl back into wanting something again, and Carl works out that there is a thing more important than what he has been protecting. He puts down half a century of guarding and chooses a boy he has known for a few days. The only reason that choice registers at all is that the film already made me sit through what he is putting down. The ten minutes exist so that this moment can collect.

What I walked away holding was not sadness. It was the flat realisation that it is not too late. Somebody shows you a 78-year-old man leaving town with his house attached and there is not a great deal you can do with that except take the point.

👉 Watch it on Disney+. At 96 minutes it fits inside a weeknight with room to spare.

😅 Where It Falls Short

I have been praising this thing for a while now, so here is the one thing that nagged at me. It is a single complaint, and it is about a single character.

The villain is the one place the film stops being kind

Charles Muntz has a case. He staked a career on a discovery, was publicly accused of faking it, went back to South America to bring home proof, and then stayed for decades. Up to that point his problem is the same species as Carl’s problem: a man who will not put down the thing that defined him. He could have been written as the other Carl, the version where nobody knocks on the door.

Instead, partway through, the film stops examining him. No further weighing, no internal conflict, just a straight promotion to pure antagonist. Muntz genuinely bothered me, and I still think this is a great film. That is the frustrating part. Everywhere else this is a story generous enough to leave something soft under even its cruellest turns, and that generosity switches off for exactly one person. The last act ends up feeling coarser than the ninety minutes around it. Handle Muntz with the care the first ten minutes got and this film goes somewhere else entirely.

📺 Streaming Guide by Service

There is one subscription answer in the US and it is Disney+. That happens to be the answer in Japan as well, which makes this the rare title that behaves identically on both sides of the Pacific. Everything Pixar has made lives on that same service, so if the opening sends you looking for more of the same hand, WALL-E is a couple of clicks away. If you only want this one film, a rental costs less than a month of anything.

🎬 If You Loved Up, Watch These 5 Next

This site is written from Japan, so the five below are Japanese titles rather than the Pixar shelf you can already find. Grief that arrives late, being told you started too old, an unwilling adult stuck with a small child: Japanese animation has been working these for decades, often without the balloons.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

An elf who lives for thousands of years spends ten of them with a human party, treats it as a short errand, then watches them age out from under her. The questions only start at the funeral. Carl gets his correction from a scrapbook in one afternoon. Frieren takes an entire series to reach the same place, which is a slower and meaner way of doing it.

👉 Read the Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End review

Violet Evergarden

A girl raised as a weapon takes work ghostwriting letters for strangers, and spends the series slowly decoding the last thing that was said to her. The mechanism is the scrapbook again. Somebody who is gone is still handing you a message you were not ready to open. Kyoto Animation put a budget behind it that you can see in every frame of handwriting.

👉 Read the Violet Evergarden review

Medalist

A figure skater whose own career never happened takes on a girl everyone in the sport has already written off as having started too late. If the line that stayed with you from Up was that it is not too late, this is the same nerve with a competition clock attached. Note that the only official trailer is the Japanese one, so the clip above is unsubtitled.

👉 Read the Medalist review

Tokyo Godfathers

Three homeless people find an abandoned baby in Tokyo on Christmas Eve. One of them is a middle-aged man who walked out on his own family and has been circling that fact ever since. Satoshi Kon locks a stubborn old man together with a small child and lets neither of them off. Carl and Russell, at street level, in December.

👉 Read the Tokyo Godfathers review

Castle in the Sky

When Carl’s house punches into that storm cloud, anybody raised on Miyazaki thinks of the dragon’s nest. Pete Docter has said publicly that Miyazaki shaped him, and he supervised the English dub of Howl’s Moving Castle. I could not find him naming this particular film, so take the connection as mine rather than his. A flying house and a floating castle, and in both cases somebody actually reaches the place they had only ever been told about.

👉 Read the Castle in the Sky review

📝 Final Thoughts

“The first ten minutes are the whole film” is about half right. Those minutes are close to perfect, and there is a working reason for putting something that good at the front. The scene most films would save for the epilogue is used here as the prologue instead, which means the audience goes into the adventure already knowing the full weight of what the man is holding. That is why thirty seconds of furniture hitting the floor lands. That is why choosing the boy lands. Remember the run-up I mentioned at the top? That is what it was for.

Watching a 78-year-old tie balloons to his roof left me braver than I came in. “It is never too late to start” is a worn-out line and I am aware of it. This film hands it over attached to the full weight of a life where the savings jar got broken three times, which makes it very hard to refuse. If you have not seen it, clear 96 minutes on a weeknight.

⭐ Series at a Glance

Category	Rating
Story	★★★★☆
Visuals	★★★★★
Music	★★★★★
Characters	★★★★☆
Emotional Impact	★★★★★
Accessibility	★★★★★