Pixar @25: UP "Cross your heart! Cross it!"

Sometimes promises can take us to "places lost in time".

Whether it's in Paradise Falls or in a life we should've lived years ago, we still want to promise and keep promises, no matter how absurd or impossible they might be. It must've been the timeless culture of spitting out easy words and sleeping over them. Couples break up, politics is an unwanted term of itself, kids fight--all because of broken promises.

Then a little mute Carl (Edward Asner) shows up, only to be forced by a young, adventurous Ellie (Elie Docter) to cross his heart to hitchike to Impossible Mountain. As the story unfolds, we learn the truth about making promises, with Pixar's touching animated feature film Up (2009, directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson).

"Adventure is out there!" From a lovable couple with the strong guts for some paradise hunting, Carl and Ellie dreamed together, saved money for Paradise Falls together, lost together and fantasized together about the place lost in time. Four scores after, with Ellie gone and the adventure book half-forgotten, it was time for 78-year-old Carl to keep the promise and embark on a journey to both a lost utopia and a life he'd forgotten to live all along.

While we witnessed and laughed at his adventures with the guys he met along the way and the obstacles he managed to overcome despite his old fragile age, we also learned how difficult it is to keep two promises at once, especially when time is not on our side and we'd have to choose which one we'll hold on to first. We also saw how determined he was to keep his promise to Ellie, only to tell us how valuable and meaningful promises should be.

Russell (Jordan Nagai), the chubby and earnest boy scout, also shared to us the sad political life of garnering a lot of medals an yet not being strong and experienced enough to survive the "wild life". On the othe hand, he was conditioned to believe how easy life is in the real world, only to finally taste it as more dangerous but more exciting at the same time.

Crossing your heart isn't much of a crime, especially for a kid, except it will define who we are in the future.

UP Fact Sheet

1. Director Pete Docter took the movie to a Broadway and Hollywood caricature style, referring to Al Hirschfeld's works.

2. Square and circle personalities surrounded Up's characters for easy recognition, according to Docter. Carl has a square personality, symbolizing the "blue" emotions of being alone and stuck, while Russell has a circle personality making him opitmistic and simply adventurous.

PIXAR @25: Monsters Inc. "The world behind the closet door"

"What we didn't know, is that we scare them."

What comes out from our closets might not be scary monsters after all.

Pixar reawakened another amusing and childish belief with its wordwide box office hit film Monsters Inc. (2001, directed by Pete Docter and David Silverman), and made us all laugh at the memory when we'd actually believed monsters would emerge from our closets and scare the helll out of us.

Just as we'd imagined, the movie portrayed that eerie atmosphere,the dark bedroom, the closet door twitching, as we trembled in fear and hid in our blankets. That hideous, blood-curdling monster would complete our ghoulish nightmare, and as we watched the movie, we'd realized at one point how we must've overdone our monster sketches.

With Pixar's ever-creative portrayal of a feature film and its exceptional story twists, we learned two new things: for monsters, scaring kids was nothing personal--they're only doing their job to "collect screams" and fuel the Monster World with its power.

"We scare because we care." So out came the most menacing--but rather cuddly--monster in town: James P. "Sulley" Sullivan (John Goodman), ready to break records and beat his nemesis Randall Boggs (Steve Buscemi) with the help of his one-eyed friend Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal). And from Monsters Inc.'s "doorshelf" out came the pink flowery door, the door that would change his life forever.

Now the rhetorical question would be, "Who got scared?" What-we-didn't-know number two: we "toxic" kids actually scare our monsters in return.  He who scares was now scared he would get germs from us.

The story came to an impossible but touching monster-kid relationship. And as we toured the breathtaking world behind our closets, we discovered the good side of such misunderstood creatures we'd deemed our worst nightmares, and realized that monsters aren't so different from us after all--as they can also gain a change of heart.

The scene when Sulley was playing hide-and-seek with the brave two-year-old kid Boo (Mary Gibbs)  in the bathroom always give me the chills, thinking if I could ever play hide-and-seek with the beast hiding in my closet.

What do we know? We might meet our personal monsters one day, and change their lives just as they've changed ours.

MONSTERS INC. Fact Sheet

1. The movie's inspiration came from director Pete Docter, who, as a child, knew there were scary monsters in his closet.

2. Sulley's body animation (with over two million computer-animated hairs) was no easy task, Pixar animated. The technical team had created a Render Man DSO (Dynamically Stimulated Object) propriety program for Sulley's hairs.

3. Kids must've really loved Monsters Inc., as it soared past the $524M mark in worldwide box office receipts and even surpassed Disney's Lion King in 2002.

4. Monsters Inc. won the Oscars Award for Best Original Song ("If I Didn't  Have You") and nominated for Best Animated Feature Film, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing.