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2009 – Disney-Pixar – Spoiler alerts There are two children’s animated movies among the One In Four Mental Health studies film festival I have been attending this week. The first was this delightful original Disney movie, one avoiding maudlin songs and twee messages. It features Carl Friedrickson (Ed Asner), who, along with his girlfriend, idolizes a South American adventurer – explorer called Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). The couple live their lives restoring a ruined old house they now live in, which drains the funds they hoped to use to follow in the missing Muntz’s footsteps. When his wife dies, Karl gets lonely, and maintains the house as a shrine to his bride, promising to somehow fulfil her dream for her and visit the legendary waterfalls supposedly discovered by Muntz. With developers threatening to take his house, and after a defensive assault on a delivery driver, Carl is threatened with being sent to live in a home. He escapes by using thousands of the balloons he sold for a living to float himself and his house into the sky, hoping to go to South Africa but he has picked up an accidental stowaway, a young Chinese boy scout, who becomes his friend, and sees him as a new father figure. Reaching the fabled waterfall, they find Muntz (unfeasibly still alive though now as old as Carl) but he wants to catch and kill a new species of emu like bird that the boy has found an befriended. Carl finds himself torn between saving his new friend and the house, effectively letting go of his old dreams and promises for something new. How things are resolved is poignant and beautiful enough to reduce grown men to tears. A delightful film throughout, especially in its early scenes as the depressed and lonely, if cantankerous Carl fails to see that he himself is the great adventure his girlfriend / wife really desired all her life – a message he will learn later. Arthur Chappell