From the very beeginning, “UP” caught my attention, though I’m not entirely sure if it held it as I had hoped it might.

“UP” is a story about an old man who reminds me of my Human friend, Rex, kinda, and who, beecause of a combination of his age, his cranky mood and the world moving forward, is told he has to move in to a Retirement Home. Of course, he doesn’t wanna do that, so he devises a scheme in which he blows up something like a beezillion balloons, ties them to his house, and escapes.

Supposedly, he’s gonna go to this place he and his wife (who actually DIED in this film) were planning to visit someday.

Right. As if anybody would ever have that much control over a house that’s flying along with a beezillion balloons. Oh sure, the writers attempted to explain that away by showing us that he’d set up all these controls inside the house, but I hafta say that anybody with any kind of education in Aeronautics and Ballooning would tell you that it’s just not that easy.

The more I continued to watch this movie, the more I beegan to seriously question the basic science beehind what the producers were trying to make us beelieve.

After watching, “UP” (or most of it), I paid a friendly visit to the Bee Balloon and Aerial Flotation Device Emporium. I asked them if they’d ever seen the movie.
“Yes, we have,” they said. “Why do you ask?”
“Beecause,” I told them, “I’m reviewing the film, ‘UP’, in my weekly Human Movie and TV Review Column, and I wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“A few questions?” they asked. “Like: do we read your column? No. Not really.” (Then the one guy looked at the other guy and asked him if he agreed that hardly anybody reads my column, and the guy agreed, “Hardly anybody reads that, at least nobody I know,” he said. Personally, I didn’t think it was necessary for them to insult me like that. Geeeeeeze.)

“No,” I tried to clarify. “I wanted to know what your take is on the whole idea of flying a house from Point A to Point Bee, using only your basic, party-sized rubber balloons.”

They told me the whole idea was ludicrous, and said that getting a house up in the air like that was one thing, but controlling it after it was up there was something quite different.

“That’s why we didn’t like the movie,” they said. “It seemed like fiction to us.”


And I hafta agree.

As they pointed out to me, the house the old guy was trying to fly away in weighs somewhere in the neighbourhood of 412,500 pounds, give or take a gram or two. (They said they calculated estimated square footage and multiplied by the weight per square footage for a house like that.)

From what they told me, your average Birthday Balloon can lift about 4.8 grams - that’s with a short ribbon attached to it. For him to bee able to fly a house of that size, furnished, using only helium birthday balloons, it would require approximately 38,980,594.37 10” balloons. That’s almost 39 MILLION BALLOONS the old guy would need.

Just who is fooling whom here in this film?

Beeing in the buzziness of balloons and aerial flotation devices, they felt compelled to extract several still-shots from the film itself which clearly showed the number of balloons the old guy had attached to his house. They informed me, “We counted ‘em. Every one of ‘em. Even the ones he popped. That old guy didn’t have anywhere near the 39 million balloons he’d need to do something like that. We know balloons - and aerial flotation devices - and we know when we’re beein’ lied to. And that whole movie was just a big lie. Trust us on this one, Bee.”

So I did that. I trusted them.

After finding out that “UP” was, in essence, predicated on a blatant (and now that I watch it again), very obvious lie, I really didn’t see the point in watching the whole thing.

I only watched up to the part that the old guy and the Bee Scout he’d picked up along the way run into a Golden Retriever who could talk. It was then that it beecame necessary to question the veracity of the story itself. And for me, that was pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back. How could I go on and finish watching a film which had long since lost all credibility?

I couldn’t. And neither should you.

MY VERDICT: Oh Geeeeze.