Up is a seriously wonderful, wonderful, charming and sad movie. There hasn’t been anything – including in this movie – that has made me happier than the first 10 minutes.

It’s a virtuoso sequence told through music – it’s everything the first half of Wall-E was promised to be only so much better. It’s about the wonders of being a kid on an adventure, it’s the wonderful of old-timey speak (“he landed his blimp in New Hamp-Shire!”).

And then there’s a dialogue-free sequence that’s so sweet and so fun and so heart-rending that the rest of the movie just can’t hold up. Really one of the most amazing few minutes in any movie, much less an animated Pixar flick.

But the rest of the movie IS good – I had a big dumb grin on my face through most of it and there’s just a lot of little little jokes that made me laugh…

The voice acting is great, the line delivery is great, the jokes are fun and I just grinned like an idiot through the whole thing. And, of course, it’s gorgeous to watch. There’s small touches like when the balloons are released, they cast a shadow that’s solid in the middle and colored at the edges where the sunlight manages to get through (since there rare fewer balloons to block the light)

Score: 86