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Rated 4.0

An elderly balloon vendor (voice by Edward Asner) sets his house airborne with a gazillion balloons to seek a long-deferred adventure in South America—inadvertently taking a neighbor boy (Jordan Nagai) with him. The latest Pixar feature (written by Bob Peterson and co-directed by him and Pete Docter) has a virtuoso opening sequence, tracing the old man’s 60 years with his wife from childhood to her death in an almost heartbreaking series of vignettes. The movie never quite matches the sublime heights of those first 10 minutes, but it still has adventure, humor and beauty to spare. Pixar proves once again that they are incapable of making a pictorially or emotionally uninteresting movie. Their mastery of facial expressions is amazing; faces barely move, yet the characters’ thoughts are crystal clear.