These days, Pixar stands alone in being a reliable source for “family” entertainment that doesn’t leave any quarters cringing. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that I recoil whenever anyone self-identifies as a “Pixar dork”—as if it were unusual to appreciate something that’s both critically acclaimed and gobbled up by the masses. That peculiarly self-serving form of self-effacement aside, Pixar deserves its crown—and Up is a jewel that shines brightly, partly because its peculiarities give it an all-the-more colorful glow.

What’s Up? Well, it begins with a newsreel about explorer/adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer); he’s the hero of an introverted young fan named Carl (Edward Asner) and his girlfriend Ellie (Elie Docter), but his obsession with finding an extinct bird in Paradise Falls, South America, has left him discredited. Carl and Ellie grow up and get married—sixty-odd years pass via a quickie montage—and they save up to venture to Paradise Falls, but never make it. They can’t have children, and advance to old age together, but Ellie dies, leaving Carl an embittered oldster, unwilling to let go of her memory, or even their house (which has become an obstruction to a construction site).

In a fit, Carl canes a man who tampers with the mailbox that he and Ellie installed years before, and is resigned to a retirement home; but he has another trick up his sleeve: He inflates hundreds of balloons from his chimney, and flies the house toward South America. He did not, however, account for a stowaway: a chinless Asian blimp-boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who needs to assist a senior to attain his final merit badge. When they finally reach the continent, Carl wants to give Russell change for the bus ride home (that’ll require a lot of transfers, Russell notes), but the house crash-lands across from the falls. Carl needs the boy’s help to drag the house across before its balloons deflate and it becomes sedentary.

On the way, they encounter a big, variegated bird that Russell nicknames “Kevin,” and Dug (Bob Peterson), a dog assigned to track and capture the bird. Dug, like the rest of his pack, is equipped to speak by his mysterious master, and he sputters on dopily with occasional breaks to say, “Squirrel!” Crotchety old Carl wants to have nothing to do with the animals, though Russell quickly befriends them. Kevin is the bird of Muntz’s obsession, and the canine hunters are his henchmen, but their master has gone Ahab—and Muntz’s monomania about clearing his name makes him the villain of the picture. In order to win out, Carl must shed himself of his own idée fixe: He must let his wife and childhood fantasy go, and take responsibility for both Russell (who is, of course, neglected by his own father) and the critters.

At this juncture, the movie’s faults become evident. Though the screenwriter-directors, Pete Docter and Peterson (who also came up with the story with Thomas McCarthy), play it coolly, the boy’s having a distant father is a tad mawkish—though, Up being a children’s movie, one can let that slide. The movie does, however, begin to choke on its pathos in a scene where Russell reprimands Carl for choosing to save his house rather than Kevin. The boy’s accusatory tone is clearly out-of-character—and, on top of that, somewhat unreasonable—so we sense immediately that it’s a cheap trick to force Carl into taking the high road and completing his character arc. Another problem—or kind-of problem—is with Plummer’s performance: His villain, who really should be long dead by now, is still full of juice; and Plummer plays him with such skillful braggadocio that even adults might get goosebumps. Muntz, a cleverly written nemesis who seems inspired by Charles Lindbergh (another heroic aviator whose name has been sullied), might become the bane of impressionable young viewers (and their bleary-eyed parents) during the wee hours of the night. But that’s only to say that Plummer revels in his plum role.

Yet Up is a warm and freshly eccentric movie. It seems to balance Disney cuddliness with Looney Tune impudence—yet it’s harmless enough that a wide audience has scant reason to complain. Last year’s WALL-E was fresh and modern because it combined the lovebirds with the traditional woodland-creature choir, and then mechanized the result. The whole affair was wrapped around an environmentalist message-movie, to boot. But charming as it was, WALL-E was still about old puppy-love; paternity is nothing new to Pixar (thanks to Finding Nemo and The Incredibles), but an old man’s getting over loss and coming to responsibility is. And, aside from the instances referenced, Up doesn’t get weighed down by sentimentality; its tone keeps it buoyant, and its humor keeps it fresh. If the Indiana Jones movies were revisionist history written with a pop-culture pen, Up seems set in a present in which that epical past actually transpired. Up’s mythology is infused with those of The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, King Kong, and even Mike Nichols’s 1973 epic-fail The Day of the Dolphin. But the references aren’t lingered on; they’re all just part of this happy world where anything goes. The old-fashioned tales of heroism and adventure, coupled with the C.G. imagery (whether witnessed with 3D glasses or without) and Michael Giacchino’s dynamic score (a marked improvement over the bombast he composed for J. J. Abram’s Star Trek), help maintain an exuberant, charming—and very home-spun—feeling of romanticism; but the atmosphere itself seems borrowed from old French movies.

This surprising Francophilia is, I think, what keeps Up fresh. It informs this film’s sense of humor, which resembles that of Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders or Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart or François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. (That last film was identified by Pauline Kael as a “comedy about melancholia” and involved the attempts its hero—played by Charles Azvanour—made to dodge his responsibilities as a human being. Azvanour dubbed Carl’s part in the French release of Up.) Of course, Up lacks the depth and bite of these adult-themed foreign films; but the new movie takes the French comedy, Americanizes it, and makes it house-trained, yet manages to keep that loose style’s appeal without affronting it. I laughed out loud when grumpy old Carl called a straight-laced businessman a hippie (in Asner’s perfect get-off-of-my-lawn tone), and again after Muntz’s menacing, sharp-toothed top dog delivered his threats in the voice of a cartoon chipmunk. This sense of surprise is more frequent in Up than it was in any other Pixar picture that I can recall, and the particular type of smile it produces bridges the gap between children and “adults.”

We can’t go back to the days when all entertainment was “family” entertainment, and, personally, I don’t really want to. Sometimes, though, we all need a bit of silly, inoffensive humor to clear our senses—inoffensive, not “safe” (that is, gutless). Up is just goofy enough that its wholesome, straight humor has a slant; and it’s that precarious little edge—that wink from the filmmakers that indicates they’re willing to try something different—that makes Up a real uplift.