If you’re looking at the picture to the right, you’ve been spoiled as to who the villain is in Pixar’s Up. But if you think it’s Kirk Douglas, I don’t blame you – while the character is voiced by Christopher Plummer this design (which comes to us from a French Pixar blog, via Slashfilm) reminds me of a great actor whose stroke probably renders him unfit for voiceover work.
I wonder if the character began life as Kirk Douglas? There are more spoilers to come: in the film Plummer plays Charles Mudds, an aeronaut/adventurer who inspired Carl – played by Ed Asner – when Carl was a young man. Or Plummer’s character is the son of that adventurer; I’m not 100% sure, but he definitely lives in a lost world in South America where he has talking dogs that hunt the local magnificent fowl.
All of this, by the way, is a spoiler right now. While Pixar may reveal this character and this plot in the eventual marketing of the movie, he doesn’t appear in the first forty-five minutes of the movie, which I saw in rough form this December. Of course I’m trying to pussy foot around it all today, but I bet everything I’m labelling as a spoiler is revealed in a month or two.