{"id":2655,"date":"2010-04-01T13:30:31","date_gmt":"2010-04-01T12:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/\/?p=2655"},"modified":"2010-04-01T13:30:31","modified_gmt":"2010-04-01T12:30:31","slug":"idealism-wins-at-the-oscars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/etbscreenwriting.com\/idealism-wins-at-the-oscars\/","title":{"rendered":"Idealism Wins at the Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Pixar won the 2009 Oscar for Best Animated Feature with Up<\/strong>. All seven Pixar films released since the creation of the category have been nominated. Five have taken home the Oscar: Finding Nemo<\/strong>, The Incredibles<\/strong>, Ratatouille<\/strong>, WALL-E<\/strong>, and Up<\/strong>. Three of those five Oscar winners\u2014 Up<\/strong>, The Incredibles<\/strong> and\u00a0Ratatouille<\/strong>\u2014 are Power of Idealism films.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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A character driven by the Power of Idealism wants to stand out from the crowd, to be extraordinary, unique and \u00a0special. Power of Idealism stories are about youthful rebellion, heroic sacrifice, loss and transcendent love.<\/div>\n

The protagonist in Power of Idealism film wants to stand out from the crowd, to be unique or special or to live an extraordinary life. These characters often play the role of the rebel, the romantic, the outsider, the iconoclast, the artist, or the maverick. \u00a0Power of Idealism stories are about rebellion, loss, longing and transcendent love.<\/p>\n

The protagonist in Up<\/strong> is curmudgeonly Carl\u00a0(Ed Asner), the last stubborn holdout in a large urban renewal scheme. \u00a0His beloved wife is dead and he seemingly has nothing to live for. \u00a0When he defends his home with his cane, actually drawing blood from a construction worker, Carl is legally ordered into a retirement home. \u00a0Instead, he makes an extraordinary and dramatic escape. \u00a0But let’s back up a little.<\/p>\n

The film\u00a0begins in the era of newsreels and the amazing derring-do of movie serials. \u00a0These 1930’s stories are filled with exotic adventures and handsome heroes who conquer far-off lands to bring back strange and exciting discoveries.<\/p>\n

As a little boy, Carl is mesmerized by fantastic tales about the famous explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). \u00a0The newsreels show Muuntz celebrated and lionized and then humiliated. \u00a0The skeleton of Muntz’s greatest discovery, a large flightless bird from the wilds of South America, is denounced as a fake. As Carl walks home from the movies, he longs to be a legendary explorer. \u00a0He imagines a crack in the sidewalk to be a yawning canyon and leaps it in a single bound while an imaginary newsreel breathlessly narrates his “great adventure.”<\/p>\n

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A little gap-toothed tomboy, Ellie, bursts into Carl\u2019s dreamy but solitary world. \u00a0Their long life together unfolds in a beautiful wordless montage\u2014 friendship, young love, wedded bliss and the slow dissolution of their dreams; first to share their life’s adventure with a child and then to share an adventure together in Paradise Falls, South America, where the great explorer Muntz mysteriously disappeared.<\/div>\n
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When Ellie gets sick and dies, the elderly and embittered Carl is left with nothing but his memories and Ellie’s scrapbook, \u201cMy Big Adventure,\u201d which she kept to fuel her hopes through-out the years. \u00a0Carl keeps Ellie’s book but can hardly bear to look at it. \u00a0He believes it stands in silent reproach for dreams so long denied or deferred that they turned into dust and nothingness.<\/div>\n
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Stripped of everything he holds dear, his house about to be demolished, Carl escapes at last to South America. \u00a0His house is born aloft by thousands of helium balloons, which he used to sell as a park vendor. \u00a0A chubby little stowaway and faithful Wilderness Explorer, Russell (Jordan Nagai), tags along for the sake of a missing merit badge. \u00a0Russell\u00a0has all the good-humoured resilience and tenacity (as well as the shape) of a Weeble, the iconic children’s roly-poly toy. \u00a0“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.”<\/div>\n
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Near the famed Paradise Falls, Carl finally meets his childhood hero, Muntz. The elderly explorer lives with an army of dogs who talk via their bark-activated electronic collars. \u00a0The eccentric and still dashing adventurer continues his obsessive search for a live specimen of the rare bird species that discredited and ruined his career so many years ago.<\/div>\n
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Up<\/strong> is a delightful adventure story for kids and\u00a0a powerful adult story about how regret, loss and grief are, at last, resolved. \u00a0Over the course of the movie we see Carl cling to his belief Ellie was denied her “Big Adventure.” \u00a0He feels responsible and is determined to plant the house he promised her at Paradise falls.<\/div>\n
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Carl and Russell slowly and painfully drag Carl’s heavy empty house behind them. \u00a0 When the house is nearly in place Carl finally reads Ellies “Big Adventure” book. \u00a0In it she says her ordinary life with Carl was the very best and very biggest adventure of all. \u00a0At the end of the movie, Carl is able to sacrifice the dead house to save the living Russell. \u00a0Carl finds his next “Big Adventure” with Russell and his mom as a treasured part of a new family.<\/div>\n
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