FILM · 2009 · USA
Up
- Directed by
- Pete Docter
- Runtime
- 96 min
- Studio
- Pixar
34 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Sep 2026
Carl Fredricksen spent his entire life dreaming of exploring the globe and experiencing life to its fullest. But at age 78, life seems to have passed him by, until a twist of fate (and a persistent 8-year old Wilderness Explorer named Russell) gives him a new lease on life.
Summary: TMDB
Up: 8 Facts About the Characters and Cast
- #003
Pete Docter chose an elderly man as Up's protagonist after drawing a grumpy old man with smiling balloons, and he and Tom McCarthy felt that the worldview of someone Carl's age would be a rich source of humor; Docter was not worried about an elderly lead in a children's film, saying children would relate to Carl as they do to their grandparents.
- #008
Pete Docter felt Joe Grant's personality shaped Carl's deceased wife Ellie more than it shaped the grouchy main character, and the "emotional bedrock" Grant called for became Carl's mourning for his wife.
- #009
Carl was based primarily on Spencer Tracy, Walter Matthau and James Whitmore, along with the grandparents of Pete Docter and his team, because Docter saw "something sweet about [those] grumpy old guys".
- #012
For the role of Russell in Up, director Pete Docter held a nationwide casting call and auditioned 400 boys.
- #013
Jordan Nagai, who is Japanese American, accompanied his brother to an audition for Up even though his brother was the one trying out; Docter noticed that Nagai behaved and spoke non-stop like Russell and cast him, at age eight.
- #019
The character Charles Muntz in Up was inspired by Howard Hughes and Errol Flynn.
- #024
The animators made Russell Asian-American and modeled him on Peter Sohn, a Korean-American Pixar storyboard artist whose likeness in a meeting sketch became the character's design.
- #025
For Up, Pixar gave Carl Fredricksen a more extreme caricatured design than usual, standing only about three heads high, and avoided elderly details such as liver spots or ear hair while adding wrinkles, nose pockmarks, a hearing aid and a cane to convey age.
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- Wikipedia Up (2009 film) — Wikipedia
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