Carl Fredricksen (right) takes off with Russell and Doug the Dog in the new 3-D animated Pixar feature Up. (Disney/Pixar)

It turns out one of the best movies in recent memory to broach the subject of old age is a kid's cartoon about balloons. Of course, it isn't just any kid's movie when it comes with the Pixar stamp, and Up follows the signature course of the world's most ambitious animation studio: a small thing – be he scaled or robotic – undergoes trauma, goes a-wandering and rouses to a stirring, self-affirming conclusion. The odd choice in Up is that the thing in question is not a cuddly Nemo or a huggable Wall-E, but an old man named Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) with an enormous, rectangular Havarti-head and two wild eyebrows that make Andy Rooney look groomed.

It turns out one of the best movies in recent memory to broach the subject of old age is a kid's cartoon about balloons.

The film opens with Carl as a little boy in a movie theatre. (Pixar is nothing if not deeply in touch with its inner child — particularly its inner child in rapture in a darkened theatre.) He's watching newsreel footage of Charles Muntz, a Lindbergh-like explorer who gets around in a blimp. As Muntz scales mountains and traverses oceans, Carl's small face – made of the same basic rectangle-head-circle-nose geometry as his aged self – explodes with awe and wonder.

The range of expression is striking, rendered in animation a bit different than in previous Pixar films. Everything feels more tactile, a little less cute and more foreboding — Carl is in the real world, but not of it, which may be a pretty good visual metaphor for the isolation of old age. The fleshiness of his head brings to mind Duane Hanson's resin sculptures – the ordinary become extraordinary – as well as the kind of finger-indenting texture of a Cabbage Patch doll. Up looks great, especially in 3-D. There aren't many aggressively or literally in-your-face 3-D shots, but a crispness that suits the story, which is really that of Carl's late-coming clarity about what his marriage actually meant.

On his way home from the theatre, young Carl meets a fellow Muntz aficionado, a girl named Ellie, who starts off as a gap-toothed tomboy (inspiring more awe and wonder in Carl), and then, in a quick flash forward, becomes his wife. From here, the pair's life together unfolds in a wordless montage, simple and direct. In less than five minutes, a wedding gives way to a life of love located in small moments feeding birds and watching the shape of clouds shift, side by side. While still young, sad news arrives that the couple can't have children, a moment depicted only by the slump of a cartoon body in a doctor's office, shot from outside the door. Something in that silent image said more than any poetic dialogue could have, a cartoon capture of the way profound moments sometimes feel like movies happening to someone else.

Ellie and a young Carl in a scene from the new Pixar feature Up. (Disney/Pixar)

The montage ends with Ellie's death (as in all great children's stories, devastating loss comes early and hard), and Carl alone in the house they built together. Their neighbourhood is being consumed by a strip-mauling – sushi and lofts – and the house is surrounded on all sides by screaming diggers and cranes, much as in the classic children's book The Little House. Carl can't take it anymore, unmooring his home and setting it aloft in the sky with an enormous flock of helium balloons. People in their glass towers point and cheer at this manifest freedom floating past their windows: Carl escapes on behalf of city drones everywhere.

Carl's goal is to get to South America and drop the house atop Paradise Falls, the place Ellie always dreamed of visiting. But a little boy has somehow attached himself to the porch, and Carl finds himself with sidekick. Russell (Jordan Nagai) is an overly excitable kid in a kind of Cub Scout uniform looking for his merit badge in "assisting the elderly." An Asian-American kid with the same round, universal nose (he resembles the overly hefty citizens of the space ship in Wall-E), he's a cheerful, clueless sweetheart, too innocent to recognize he's as much of an outsider as Carl.

You know where this is going: Who will rescue whom? Once on land, the ranks of grumpy Carl and the lonely little boy are filled out by an enormous rainbow-coloured bird called Kevin and Dug the Dog. Muntz, who's gone a little Kurtz up in the jungle, has trained a dog army to communicate their thoughts through high-tech collars. I, for one, couldn't get enough of this running joke (clearly written by a cat person) about the galumphing simplicity of the canine world view, where every thought is interrupted by cries of: SQUIRREL! Human question: Wanna fetch the ball? Dog answer: Oh, I would! Very much so! I will bring it back to you and you will like me!

Muntz wants those dogs to bring him the Kevin-bird for his collection. Voiced by Christopher Plummer, Muntz has his own quest narrative to enact. He's seeking a comeback, but, poignantly, his type is long obsolete.

Pixar knows its sentimentality portions well: never too much, never too little. Up may be a formulaic summer blockbuster put out there by that behemoth Disney, but it never feels cynical. The artistry is too caring, and its heart too afloat.

Up opens across Canada on May 29.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.