Carl & Ellie from Up Part 2

 Please click here to see Carl & Ellie Part 1.

Some facts about Up:

1. All characters in “Up” are based upon circles and rectangles, except for the villains who are triangles. Not only are Carl and Ellie based on squares and circles, but objects around them are based on their shapes, like their chairs and picture frames. When they both appear in a photograph, the frame is both circle and square.

2. The villain Charles Muntz is named after Charles Mintz, the Universal Pictures executive who in 1928 stole Walt Disney’s production rights to his highly-successful “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” cartoon series. This led Walt Disney to create Mickey Mouse, who soon eclipsed Oswald in popularity. Muntz is the fifth animated Disney villain to fall to his death – following the Wicked Queen (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), Ratigan (The Great Mouse Detective, 1986), McLeach (The Rescuers Down Under, 1990), Gaston (Beauty and the Beast, 1991), and Frollo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996). He is the first Pixar villain to do so.

3. In June 2009, 10-year-old Colby Curtin from Huntington Beach, California, was suffering from the final stages of terminal vascular cancer. Her dying wish was to live long enough to see “Up” (2009). Unfortunately, Colby was too sick to leave home and her family feared she would die without seeing the film. A family friend contacted Pixar, and a private screening was arranged for Colby. The company flew an employee with a DVD copy of “Up”, along with some tie-in merchandise from the film. Colby couldn’t see the screen because the pain kept her eyes closed, so her mother gave her a play-by-play of the film. Seven hours after viewing the film, Colby passed away.

4. If Carl’s house was approximately 1600 square feet, and the average house weighs between 60-100 pounds per square foot, it weighs 120,000 pounds. If the average helium balloon can carry .009 pounds (or 4.63 grams), it would take 12,658,392 balloons to lift his house off the ground. (20,622 balloons appear on the house when it first lifts off.)

5. Carl Fredricksen’s face and gruff personality are based on actors Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau.

6. Dug’s ‘point’ pose, where his entire tail, back, and head is in a perfectly straight line, is an homage to the identical pose that Mickey’s dog Pluto often makes. Dug also shares a similar color scheme to Pluto.

7. “Up” was the first film produced by Pixar to be shown in 3D. “Up”‘s musical score has become the 9th musical score (and the 3rd from an animated film) to win the Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award for “Best Original Score”. The other previous winners are “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), “Jaws” (1975), “Star Wars” (1977), “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (1982), “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), “Aladdin” (1992), “The English Patient” (1996), and “The Lord of the Rings: The Retorn of the King” (2003). “Up” was the first film to be nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Animated Feature.

8. Film debut of Jordan Nagai, who voices Russell. Originally, his older brother Hunter was auditioning for the part, and Nagai simply came along with him. About 400 children had showed up for the auditions, but Nagai stood out because he would not stop talking. Director Pete Docter later said that “as soon as Jordan’s voice came on we started smiling because he is appealing and innocent and cute and different from what I was initially thinking.”

9. When the dogs start attacking Russell with airplanes at the end, this aerial fight literally becomes a ‘dogfight’. Also, the dogs refer to each other with “Grey leader”, “Grey One”, “Grey Two”, etc. This is a nod to “Star Wars” (1977), where pilots referred to each other with Red Leader, Red One, etc., and it also jokingly refers to the myth that dogs cannot see colors, only black, white and shades of gray.

10. All of the dogs except for Dug are named after letters of the Greek alphabet (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc) although this could relate to rankings in a dog pack, where the lead male is known as the Alpha, then Beta and so on. This is supported by the fact that when Dug puts Alpha in the Cone of Shame, all the other dogs begin referring to Dug as Alpha. The voices of both Dug and Alpha are performed by the same actor, Bob Peterson. The three main dog characters, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma, as well as being named for the Ancient Greek alphabet, also reference three classes of workers in Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World”. It is also worth noting that Muntz’s “chef” is a dog named Epsilon, another class of worker from “Brave New World”.

Source: IMDb.