During this stage of development, Docter revealed that the biggest single influence on the film was The Station Agent, a 2003 comedy-drama written and directed by Tom McCarthy, and starring a pre-Game of Thrones Peter Dinklage as a man who just wants to get away from it all and seeks solitude in an abandoned train station.
3. Docter, Peterson and Tom McCarthy worked on the story concept for several months, not making any further character progress, until one day Docter drew a grumpy old man holding a bunch of balloons with smiling faces on. The dichotomy of the two amused the trio; the contrast between the elderly grumpy man and the happy balloons clicked and it was decided to make the protagonist and elderly character because the writers felt their experiences and the way they affect their view of the world was a rich source of humour, and the younger audience would be able to relate to them like they would a grandparent.
"just want[ing] to join his wife up in the sky. It was almost a kind of strange suicide mission or something. And obviously that's [a problem]. Once he gets airborne, then what? So we had to have some goal for him to achieve that he had not yet gotten."The writers then decided to have Carl and Wilderness Explorer Russell land the house on a Soviet-era spy airship camouflaged as a giant cloud, rather than on a tepui as would later be the case. This concept was rewritten due to its similarity to another idea Pixar was developing which never came to fruition.
With a final story locked in-place, some ideas were trimmed before being animated. Among them was to be a sub-plot about a magic fountain-of-youth, but this was no water fountain, rather they were fountain-of-youth eggs laid by the bird. This was written in to explain the age discrepancy between the character Charles F. Muntz, who was Carl's hero as a child and was still very much alive and kicking and looking about the same age as old man Carl when the pair finally met. Docter decided that this subplot was too distracting, and people would forgive the age inconsistency. Hand wave, nothing to see here.
Talking of Russell, the character's design was based on Pixar animator Peter Sohn. This came about after a meeting where the Pixar employees sketched each other, and a drawing of Sohn came Docter's way. Finding a voice for Russell wasn't so easy though, as Docter auditioned 400 boys in a nationwide casting call for the part. Jordan Nagai, who is Japanese American, showed up to an audition with his brother, who was actually the one auditioning for the role, but Docter realised Nagai behaved and spoke non-stop like Russell and chose him instead.
At least Pete Docter didn't have to look too far for his Ellie as his daughter, Elizabeth Docter, provided the voice for the character.
7. Howard Hughes and real-life adventurers Charles Lindbergh and Percy Fawcett were inspirations for the character of Charles Muntz, as voiced in Up by Christopher Plummer, but his name bears a strinking resemblance to the man who once employed Walt Disney...
So, is Up's villain Charles Muntz a nod to Charles Mintz, the man who "stole" Disney's first creation? No one's confirming the answer to that question.
8. And then there was Carl Fredricksen...
To animate old people, Pixar animators would study their own parents or grandparents and also watched footage of the Senior Olympics. The animators had various rules for Carl's movements: he could not turn his head more than 15–20 degrees without turning his torso as well, nor could he raise his arms high. However, they also wanted him to grow more flexible near the end of the film, transforming into an "action hero".
When Asner saw a composite model of his character he he stated, "I don't look anything like that." Which was because, although Asner had informed the character's personality, the appearance of Carl is meant to resemble Spencer Tracy as he appeared in his final film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Ever wondered just how many helium balloons it would take to lift the Fredricksen's house? Well, a technical director calculated that to make Carl's house fly he would require 23 million standard size party balloons!
Were there 23 million balloons attached to the Fredricksen's house? There was not!
Although that's not to say Pixar didn't attempt that number, but director Pete Docter realised that such a high number made the balloons look like nothing but small dots, destroying the effect. Bigger balloons were created instead, each one twice Carl's size, meaning fewer could be used. Although technically still not enough to lift the house, 10,297 of these larger balloons are animated for shots of the house just flying, with 20,622 balloons for the lift-off sequence, and a varying number in other scenes throughout.
A pastime known as "cluster ballooning" sees a harnessed 'balloonist' attached to a cluster of helium-inflated rubber balloons. One of the first notable flights' came in July 1937 when the French adventurer Auguste Piccard experimented with cluster ballooning in Rochester, Minnesota. Inspired by Piccard, an American photographer for Paramount News used 32 weather balloons for a feature photography assignment near Old Orchard Beach in Maine. Suspended from the balloons by a parachute harness in order to take aerial film footage, his mooring rope broke and he was lifted approximately 700 feet (210 m) into the air. A clergyman spotted the incident, and after a chase of some 13 miles used a 22-caliber rifle to shoot out two of the balloons, thus allowing the photographer to return safely to the ground.
And then there was the famous Lawnchair Larry flight. In 1982, Larry Walters, without any prior ballooning experience, attached 42 helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair and lifted off. He took his pellet gun, a CB radio, sandwiches, beer, and a camera.
REACT: What information do you wish me to tell [the airport] at this time as to your location and your difficulty?Walters reportedly had planned to control his altitude by using a pellet gun to selectively pop some of the balloons. However, he was initially hesitant to shoot any balloons, as he was concerned about falling out due to a loss of stability. After 45 minutes in the sky, reaching a high altitude and seeing no other way of getting down, he eventually shot several of the balloons but then accidentally dropped his pellet gun overboard. Fortunately enough were deflated and Walters descended slowly, until the balloons' dangling cables got caught in a power line, causing a 20-minute electricity blackout. He landed unharmed on the ground.
Larry: Ah, the difficulty is, ah, this was an unauthorized balloon launch, and, uh, I know I'm in a federal airspace, and, uh, I'm sure my ground crew has alerted the proper authority. But, uh, just call them and tell them I'm okay.
Although it didn't involve cluster ballooning or actually lifting a house, or anywhere near the necessary number of balloons to do so, possibly the nicest promotional stunt for any movie came in May 2009 when Up's Disney publicist's attached balloons to the roof of Edith Macefield's house. Macefield was a real estate holdout who received worldwide attention in 2006 when she turned down an offer of $1 million to sell her house to make way for a commercial development in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Like Carl Fredricksen, Macefield had lived her life in her 108-year old farmhouse and was staying put. So, the five-story project was built surrounding her little family home, where she died at age 86 in 2008. She was buried in Evergreen Washelli Cemetery, Seattle, beside her mother, who had died in 1976 on the same couch as she did.
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