Up ascends to peak of critics rankings

As Pablo noted overnight, “UP! just got 98% approval on RT !!! That’s higher than any other Pixar film.”

Up has 18 perfect scores of 100 on Metacritic, for a year’s-best average of 90. Last year, WALL-E had 20 100’s and The Dark Knight had 16 perfect scores. (Interestingly, if not tiresomely, Stephanie Zacharek gave all three of these critic’s darlings their lowest scores on the board, nearly single-handedly chipping the top off their overall averages. 50 for TDK, 70 for WALL-E, and now another 50 for Up.)

Until I’ve seen a movie, I only skim the first paragraph or two of a reveiw and skip to the end — that way most of the plot and other details keep fresh until their unwrapped in the theater. That’s why you don’t see spoilers in my excerpts. There are too many great appraisals for me to pull quotes on this busy Friday morning, so I’ll take the easy way out and suggest you click to Metacritic and do your own cherry-picking. Sifting through the reviews today, two observations stood out for me though. The first, from Peter Travers at Rolling Stone is the stretchiest comparison I’ve seen among the Up boosters:

Up may be the first animated kiddie crowd-pleaser to feature dentures and an hommage to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, as old man and boy drag a house and the burden of dreams through the jungle.

And this, from TV Guide’s Perry Seibert, gives a terrific distillation of the formula Pixar uses to consistently spin a creative philosophy in pure gold:

Pixar doesn’t really make family films in the way we’ve come to use that term — a dismissive shorthand for something blandly inoffensive. No, Pixar lets smart, quirky artists indulge their creativity, and the results are often the kind of universally appreciated movies that helped make Hollywood a dream factory in the first place. Up fits proudly into that tradition.

Using the Firefox “Find” tool to look for keywords on a page, I searched for ‘3-D’ in several reviews. More than one critic says Up would lose nothing in 2-D, and in fact it’s subtle color palette might be dimmed with the dark shades we have to don to view 3-D. I’m curious to hear more first-hand reactions to the 3-D aspect, to help me make up my mind which way to see it. (yeah, as if I’m not already planning on seeing it both ways.) Share you thoughts about that?