Up, the first Pixar film to be released in Disney Digital 3-D, may be thematically different than previous Pixar releases, but the creators are banking that the unique nature of Pixar's filmmaking process will help Up succeed.
In a recent interview, director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) said:
We have a system where people are selfless about giving up their own time, their own energy, their own comments.
Brad (Bird) will be off in the middle of directing something and we'll drag him in to watch this movie and he'll spew out all these great ideas that I get to use and then I'll do the same with whoever comes along next. Between that and the philosophy of "If you don't make mistakes, you're not taking enough risk." We're sort of expected to fail along the way. It's expected that we're going to falter and pull the emergency cord and get everybody on board to make this good.
In a separate interview, Docter admitted that not all Pixar films start out as winners:
At some point or another, every one of these (films) has sucked. That's the truth. And then you fix them.
Added producer Jonas Rivera:
We kind of treat every film like it's the first film we've ever done and the last film we'll ever do.... We kind of approach it like, whether or not people like this one as much as the last one or the first one or the third one, we don't know. We want to do the best we can every single time. So when you go see one of these, we go to bed at night knowing that's the best we can do. That's the best we got.
Up tells the tale of Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner), a grumpy man who ties balloons to his house and sails off for South America with an 8-year-old stowaway named Russell (Jordan Nagai).