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I just got back from seeing Disney/Pixar's <I>Up</I> in digital 3D. The movie itself is beautiful, both visually and conceptually. The story is charming yet poignant with lots of laughs, the voice actors&#151;led by Ed Asner as the gruff Carl Fredricksen&#151;are superb, and the animation is stunning. Interestingly, many of the animated items, even most of the dogs, are essentially photorealistic, but the humans are deliberate caricatures. I suspect Pixar goes this route because it's so difficult to animate truly realistic-looking people thanks to the exquisite human sensitivity to facial detail and body language. I have no problem with that, but I was disappointed in the 3D presentation for several reasons.

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/inkheart.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Mortimer "Mo" Folchart (Brendan Fraser) has an extraordinary gift for bringing characters from books to life when he reads aloud. But there's a danger&#151;when a character is brought to life from a book, a real person disappears into its pages. On a trip to a secondhand-book shop, Mo hears voices from <i>Inkheart</i>, a book he's been searching for since his wife vanished into its mystical world 12 years earlier, at which point Mo vowed that he would stop at nothing to reunite his family.