Up

UP

On the Hari Raya week, we are supposed to write about any film that we watched in that week. I decided to watch Up as it was one of my favourite movie back when I was still a teenager. Up is a 3D animation film, which the main genre was Comedy-Drama. The film focus on an elderly widower named Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) and a young boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who is a Wilderness Explorer Member. Then in the journey they met a bird who was named by Russell call Kevin and they also met a loyalty dog named as Dug.

The semantic and syntactic in this film is well thought through, semantic include such as location, characters and props. These are what usually give a film their generic genre traits. For example, in this film since it is also a family film, the scene when it shows colorful lighting and background give the audience the mood of happy, but when bad things is going to happen they will show the dark and gray scene to enhance the mood of sad and scare, because it is a drama based genre, when it comes to bad things happen they often show rain scene. For example, the scene where Carl flying his house going to the South Africa, he face through storm and the scene where Carl, Russell, Kevin and Dug was sleeping, they were also facing rains too, it is because they want to enhance the sadness and make the film mood very dramatic.

Comedy is a genre that intended to humor the audience by using sense of humor, jokes and etc. In this film, there are quite a few scenes that falls under the genre of comedy. The first one is Slapstick, slapstick is a sense of humor by performing physical and gestures movement to make the audience laugh, for example the scene where Carl and Russell was stuck under house which the only way they can go up is using the hose, Russell is the only one who can climb since Carl is too old for it, the scene show a close up of Carl waiting Russell to climb up and Russell making a lot of groaning but when Carl looks up Russell was just a little bit on top of Carl. Another humorous scene is when Russell saw a silhouette of a dog, but it is actually a real dog, and he order him to sit and shake then he order the dog to speak and it actually really speaks. In this film we can see numerous of scene of dogs performing humorously to the audience, for example, the dogs really hate squirrels and also really like the tennis ball.

Road film is a genre that is about the main character leaves the home and went on a journey, on the way the character changes, grows, and improves during the journey. In this film we can easily identify that Carl was a stubborn old man after his wife pass away, then he faces these obstacle and in the end Carl looks through Ellie's childhood scrapbook, and is surprised to find that she has filled in the blank pages with photos of their marriage, along with a note thanking him for the "adventure" and encouraging him to go have a new one, and he then changes his personality of stubborn. The film also us that the journey of Carl working his way toward the Paradise Fall by walking, he faces many obstacle and he began to bond the relationship with Russell Kevin and Dug. Which is why the film has contain the sub-genre of road film.

In conclusion, Up main genre is Comedy-Drama film and mixed with other sub-genre to support the main genre. The film also show us the moral value of don’t be stubborn and stay in the comfort zone instead of going out and find a new life.