I’m not normally a massive fan of kiddie films. I do got to see quite a few, but this is pretty much because I have two small children. I have therefore been to see an awful lot of dross. There was Bee Movie, which I thought was the most tortuous ninety minutes I had spent in my life, but of course that was before I went to see High School Musical 3.

One of the things I discovered about High School Musical 3 was that I had no interest or sympathy whatsoever in any of the characters, and spent most of the film wishing they would contract some horribly disfiguring contagion and be wiped out by machine-gunners in some sort of protective suits. When it became apparent that this was not going to happen, I spent some time counting. I counted (well, part counting, part calculating) the number of seats in the screen, the number of tiles in the ceiling and also the number of pieces of ceiling furniture (sprinklers, light settings and so on). If it hadn’t been obvious that we were approaching the end of the film I may have considered clawing my own eyes out.

I’m not that cynical about kids films: I quite enjoyed Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther 2 (much to my own surprise), got quite a nostalgia kick out of Alvin and the Chipmunks and could pretty much tolerate Madagascar 2, so it’s not like I’m a complete grump about them.

But I had specifically been looking forward to Up, so this was actually carrying the ‘weight of expectation’ tag unlike the others. Would it live up to it?

For those of you who have not seen the advert at the cinema, it tells the story of Carl Fredricksen, who is a 78-year old retiree, who just happens to attach a lot of large helium balloons to the top of his house, thus sending him flying up high into the sky as he sets off house-ballooning to South America. Only he brings Russell along with him by mistake; an 8 year old ‘wilderness scout’ (think boy scout) who had climbed under Carl’s porch looking for something just as the house lifted off…

And that was about all I knew of the film before I went to see it.

Let’s start with what is wrong with the film… this is bound to upset some people, both the Pixar fanboi element and those people who aren’t in that category but simply loved the film. The film seemed a little on the short side to me, but it apparently clocks in at 96 minutes, so maybe it’s just that the storyline is pretty linear that gives it that impression. But criticising a kids film for being a little linear is a rather weak criticism: it wouldn’t work as a kids film if it was looking in depth at the political and socio-economic problems facing a 78-year old widower, so maybe I’ll let them off with that.

The only faults I can find from my point of view — being a little over-heavy on the ‘be nice’ message, the villain being a touch too ‘twirling moustaches’, the message being slightly formulaic, aren’t really inappropriate for a kids film, so I’ll just have to move on to what I liked about it…

Well, to start with, I liked the little animated short Partly Cloudy that they showed with it.

As for the film itself, there’s a sequence at the start showing Carl as a little boy, fascinated by stories of an explorer, meeting a girl with similar tastes, and then as they grow, a relationship developing between them, and them getting married, and both wanting to visit a waterfall called Paradise Falls in Venezuela, them being unable to have children, getting older, retiring, still being very much in love and the suddenly — and like most of this intro sequence done with an absolute minimum of dialogue — we see Carl’s Ellie suddenly become ill, him seeing her in hospital, and then suddenly him sat alone at a funeral service.

It might be laid on thick, but it manages to avoid being too tacky or schmaltzy, and for the first of two occasions in the film (the other being at the end — but I’ll leave that one for you to find) it brought a tear to my usually remarkably cynical eye.

Of course, while it was patently obvious to all adults watching what had happened, there was a large proportion of kids in the audience and I heard one ask his Dad in the row in front…

Dad, why isn’t that lady in the house any more?

…but fortunately either my kids managed to grasp what had happened (or possibly didn’t notice/care) so I didn’t have any questions to face myself…

Basically, and without giving too much away, Carl plans to take his house to Paradise Falls, where he and his wife had always imagined having a house, only to find Russell as an unexpected (and cheerfully enthusiastic) companion. And, as you can imagine, they get into scrapes and adventures. In the course of events and so on.

What I can say is that I found Carl to be a fun character. It’s not that he’s unbelievable as a 78-year old widower; he is totally believable in that role, it’s just the grumpiness and cantankerousness that pretty much make you identify with him… what? okay, well maybe that’s just me… and there’s some lovely little touches, such as the tennis balls he uses on his four-pronged walking stick thingy, or the fact that (if I’m recalling correctly) he starts out clean-shaven but towards the end of the adventure you can see a white stubble flecking his chin.

He obviously develops considerably more energy as the film progresses: at the start he’s using a stairlift to get up and down his stairs; near the end, after hiking across a high plateau, he’s capable of dragging wardrobes around and getting into a sword fight. But again, this fits: it’s been Carl’s (and Ellie’s) ambition to make it to Paradise Falls so it just seems to be perfectly reasonable that he’s feeling a bit more sprightly as he gets near it.

If you liked Bee Movie, and High School Musical 3, you’ll love this. Mostly because it’s apparent that you’ll enjoy any hogwash projected onto a screen in front of you while you autoconsume popcorn. But even if you didn’t like Bee Move and High School Musical 3, you’ve got a pretty good chance of loving this, because if you accept it for what it is — a kids film — and don’t lay on unrealistic expectations, then you will bloody well enjoy it.

And it is a very, very good example of the ‘kids film’ genre. Don’t expect it to be too complex, or clever. Don’t expect much (anything) in the way of plot twists. Do just enjoy the action, the dialogue and the humour. Up is a film which stands as an excellent example of the kids film genre, and it’s not too shabby when considered as just a plain “film” either.

Do go and see it.