I went to see UP for the second time with some friends, and they pointed out some things:
When [spoil]Carl is leaving, you don’t see Russell on the porch on any of the scenes. Not even when there’s a full shot of the porch and in that scene the house is already flying.
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Also, when they [spoil]get to South Africa, Russell leaves his backpack in the house. But after he tries to go up the hose, we see him with his backpack and a red rope that came out of nowhere, since they both couldn’t get back to the house.[/spoil]
I was just pondering on these scenes. They don’t make much sense…
Well, Russel said that he followed what he thought was a “Snipe” under his porch when the house lifted up in the scene where he first got into his house.
Maybe he clinged to the bottom of the house and climbed up. Seems highly unlikely though. If anyone else has any thoughts on this, Im excited to hear!
I’m pretty sure the filmmakers were aware of both these moments and knew that if you thought too much about it… Then you thought too much about it… That’s the thing, though, they don’t particularly matter.
The part with Russell on the porch was kinda explained, so it’s just best to go with it.
As for the part with [spoil]Russell getting his backpack out of the house, perhaps he did climb up to the house at last to get his backpack and the rope. I think it kinda makes sense when you think of it, because he gets his backpack back after him and Carl already planned to walk the house to the destination. They wouldn’t then just climb back to the house to float aimlessly, plus even if Russell did climb back, what about Carl stuck down there? Russell probably just went back down to “assist” Carl[/spoil]
I will say that’s something that has bugged me a little: During the scene where Carl takes off, I think we see pretty much the entire underside of the house at one time or another. And no Russell. So, maybe he’s under the house when we can see the porch, and maybe he’s on the porch when we’re looking at the underside of the house, and obviously the filmmakers don’t want us to see him yet, but it’s still worth a nitpick.
I’m pretty sure the reason why they did not make Russell visible when the house first took off was because they wanted you to know just as much as Carl at the time. When Russell bangs on Carl’s door, it surprised us that anyone would be out there just as much as Carl found it surprising.
If they just showed him on or under the porch from the start, then we would have been a couple steps ahead of Carl and when the punchline came, it would have just been predictable for the audience and would not have been consistent with Carl’s emotion.
Carl has no time to [spoil]get the Adventure Book out of the house before it floats off[/spoil], but the credits seem to imply that he still has it. Also, this is a direct quote from Bob Peterson in The Art of Up: “It’s very satisfying that Carl brings his Adventure Book back home, because he will always have it to look through to remember Ellie. But now he’ll add pictures of him and Russell and his new life to it.” Heh, I feel like such a nitpicker, but this is kinda bothering me.
