Up-normal
Helium, Wind, and Masses
Pixar
lifted its company’s standards drastically with Up, which came out in 2009. Up is a beautiful film with a wonderful
story, and filled with unusual friendships.
However, it was also filled with oddities such as unusual helium, wind,
and masses. Originally, my disbelief was
suspended enough, like the house lifted up by a thousand balloons in the movie,
but when I re-examined Up, I saw how
the physics were exaggerated. I noticed
a few physical artistic liberties, including how the balloons are powerful
enough to bear a house’s weight, how there is hardly any wind at high altitudes,
and how objects in general are lighter in Up’s
world.
The
balloons in Up are incredibly
affective at bearing weight. Up’s world seems to have powerful
helium, which would also imply that the air in Up is heavier. In Up, about a thousand balloons are able
to uproot the main character, Carl, a Boy Scout, Russell, and an entire house out
of a neighborhood. The balloons then float
the aforementioned through a storm and to a cliff in Paradise Falls. This means that the balloons must have had
enough upward force to not only uproot a furniture-filled house and tear its
piping, but also to have raised the house to at least the cliff’s altitude, and
maintained this altitude. This certainly
could not actually occur, especially through a storm. On a smaller scale, there is a scene approximately
ten minutes in to Up, where Carl is
at a balloon stand. The balloons here
start lifting up the balloon cart, which does not ever really happen. It would also be impractical for there to be
a balloon cart that, if it were ever untethered by its owner, would float
away. Just walking the cart outside for
business would involve having one’s hands overhead with the floating cart. Another instance of the amazing balloons is about
halfway through Up, when the large fictional
bird named Kevin is capable of guiding a house via a thin string around
Paradise Falls. Granted, Kevin’s bird
species does not really exist, so her strength is debatable, but Kevin is not
at all hindered in her speed by the large house. The house is tugging upwards, and Kevin is
tugging to the side. There should at
least be more evidence of centrifugal force on Kevin, or, if Kevin is that strong, on the house. The most realism the balloons have in Up is when Carl has to empty the house
to make it light again for flight. This
implies that the balloons do lose helium after a while, like in reality. The
balloons in Up must have an amount
they can lift in Up’s world. This amount is not realistic, but it is
constant for Up.
A
second inaccuracy with Up’s physics
is that there is no wind at high altitudes.
When Carl and Russell are calmly heading to Paradise Falls before the
storm at the first third of Up, the
windows are all open and there is no evidence of any wind, even though the
house is flying. Planes do not have
windows that open to the sky, for pressure reasons, et cetera, and yet Carl and
Russell can discuss GPS machines with every window open. Even when Carl is standing atop a zeppelin,
his hair and clothes do not react much.
When cruising towards the aforementioned zeppelin and standing in the
open window of Carl’s house, Russell’s fabrics hardly rustle as much as one
would think. Yet, in this same scene,
there are enough air currents to speed the house along to the zeppelin. Russell even manages to keep his baseball hat
on for the entire movie, except for the scene in which he drops from the house
around the end. However, even this does
not match up with how, in the beautifully done montage of Carl and Ellie’s
life, Carl’s hat falls when he runs to Ellie down about ten feet of a hill.
Lastly,
objects in general are lighter in Up’s
world. When Carl’s future wife, Ellie,
lands outside his window, she does so very lightly. There is barely any sound of her
alighting. In Up’s midpoint, Carl can even tug his levitated house around with a
harness made out of a hose. Around the
end of Up, Russell is tied up to a
metal chair, and while there, slides down the ramp of a zeppelin very high
up. Russell does not tip over as one
should expect, and Carl even catches Russell one-handed when he falls off the
end of the ramp. Not only does Carl do
that, but he then lifts Russell and puts him into his house. A retirement-aged man who needs a cane and
who throws out his back with lifting said cane should not be capable of this. Another example of how light objects in Up are, is when Carl, Russell, Kevin,
and Dug, a golden retriever, file into Carl’s house from the airborne zeppelin.
Their added masses do not affect the
house’s elevation at all. They should
have, seeing how much weight was affecting the house’s second take off, for
which Carl had to empty his house earlier.
A final example of how light objects in Up are is when, while atop a high altitude zeppelin, Carl stops his
house from falling off of the zeppelin just with his own strength and tugging
on a typical watering hose. As
aforementioned, Carl requires a cane.
Yet, even after this feat, Carl attends a Boy Scout ceremony with ease. Somehow, though, this movie was still
incredible.
Up was an awesome movie, but just as
2-dimensional cartoons of yore, the physics within this animation were not
accurate. First, the balloons in Up are capable of lifting much more than
they should; second, there is basically no wind at high altitudes on moving
zeppelins and floating houses; third, the objects in general are lighter in Up’s world. These errors are strange from the standpoint
of someone living in a real world, but the animators’ physics are only
exaggerated, and, with the exception of the amount of wind, their formulas are
consistent. It is not as if the
animators of Up left the physics
completely “up in the air”.
