Cart
0
The Movie Room · a Living Undefeated resource
What happens in the first ten minutes of Up?
This is the page we built the warnings system for. Up is sold to children and opens with the loss of a pregnancy and the death of a wife. Here is exactly what is in it, exactly when, so you can decide rather than find out.
⛔ The opening, in plain terms
About four minutes in, a wordless montage called Married Life runs for roughly five minutes and carries the whole of Carl and Ellie's marriage. Inside it, in order:
- They marry and fix up a house, and plan for a baby.
- A scene in a doctor's office that the film never explains in words, after which Ellie sits alone in the garden, devastated. It is read by most viewers as a miscarriage, and by some as infertility. The film declines to say.
- They grow old. Money for the trip they have saved for is spent, repeatedly, on ordinary things.
- Ellie becomes ill and dies. Carl is shown alone at the funeral, and then alone in the house.
By minute fourteen it is over, and the film does not return to it in that register. If your loss is a pregnancy, a baby, or a spouse, this is the most-reported ambush in family animation, and it is aimed at exactly the audience least braced for it.
You can start the film at the fifteen-minute mark. Russell knocks on the door and the adventure begins; you will miss nothing you need.
What it is
A 2009 Pixar feature directed by Pete Docter, ninety-six minutes, with Ed Asner as Carl and Jordan Nagai as Russell, an eight-year-old who ends up on the porch of a house carried into the air by balloons. Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score; nominated for Best Picture.
Who this is wrong for, and when
Anyone grieving a pregnancy, an infant, or a husband or wife. Any family being handed a “nice children's film” by a well-meaning relative who has not thought about it. And, specifically, the first year — the montage's whole technique is that it moves faster than your defenses.
Why it is still on this list
Because what follows the first fourteen minutes is genuinely joyful, genuinely funny, and almost entirely free of grief, and we are not willing to pretend a good film does not exist. And because we would rather be the page that tells you than the shelf that lets you find out.
Carl's grief is the reason he is the way he is, but the body of the film is a bad-tempered old man, a talking dog and a child who will not stop narrating. A household that knows what is coming and starts fifteen minutes in gets an hour and a half of something good.
If this one is not right for you
Kiki's Delivery Service — animated, and with no death in it at all.
Paddington 2 — the safest family film on the hundred.
The whole room — every entry says what is in it before you press play.
Where to watch it
Start with your library. hoopla carries studio animation in many systems, free with a library card. It otherwise sits on Disney's own service in nearly every region.
We make nothing from any of these links. There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site and there never will be.
Back to the room
The Movie Room — one hundred films, sorted by what the evening needs.
How to tell if a charity deserves your money
We publish the test we use on ourselves, including the parts we do not pass yet. Read it here.
If tonight is bad
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — call or text 988, any time, anywhere in the United States.
Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741.
These are never behind a form on this site and never will be.
Before you give to anyone
How to tell if a charity deserves your money
We wrote down the checklist we use. Before we send a dollar anywhere, we run the organization through CharityWatch, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Charity Navigator and Candid. It is one page, and it works on any charity — including this one.
Read the checklist — freeOn the site, right now. Nothing to fill in and no email needed.
Start here — free, no sign-up
Guide one · 7 pages
A Reason to Get Up
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, and what that book can and cannot do for you after somebody dies. Who Frankl actually was, what he actually argued, and the famous quote that is not his.
Download the guide — freePDF, 7 pages. Nothing to fill in, no email, no ask attached to it.
Three more, if you want them
These are the books we read and the things we did after we lost Austin. Not advice and not therapy — an honest account of what helped us, and what the research actually says about each of it. Every statistic in them carries a source and a year.
Guide two · 9 pages
The Circling
The Power of Now, and what is actually happening when you cannot stop going over it. Includes the part no grief guide prints: meditation is not risk-free, and who should be careful.
Guide three · 11 pages
Give It Away
Why doing something for somebody else, expecting nothing back, appears to do something for you. With a verified list of places that will take you this week, and the ones that will ask you to wait a year.
Guide four · 16 pages
The First Year
The practical one. What actually has to be done, what the months afterward really look like, and fifty things that might help — each one labeled for whether there is evidence behind it.
If tonight is bad
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Free, confidential, 24 hours a day, anywhere in the US. You do not have to be in immediate danger to use it.
Crisis Text Line. Text HOME to 741741.
Veterans Crisis Line. Dial 988 then press 1, or text 838255.
If there is an immediate danger to life, call 911.
