1. What is the older adventurer's name?
Carl Fredricksen
Carl Fredricksen is a widowed balloon salesman of seventy-eight, drawn as a stubborn square where Russell is a bouncing oval. He sold balloons at the zoo where Ellie worked, and the film takes him from a condemned house to the top of a South American tepui.
2. What is Carl's late wife's name?
Ellie
Ellie is the loud one of the pair as a child, voiced by the director's daughter, and the wordless montage of their marriage covers decades, a lost pregnancy and a savings jar they keep raiding. Her motto about adventure being out there comes from a newsreel.
3. Who voices Carl?
Ed Asner
Asner was best known as the newsman Lou Grant, first on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then in his own drama, and he was in his late seventies when he recorded Carl. The part gave him a late second stardom, and he died in 2021 at ninety-one.
4. What is the young Wilderness Explorer called?
Russell
Russell is a Junior Wilderness Explorer with a sash full of badges, voiced by Jordan Nagai, a first-time actor found when his older brother auditioned. His father never shows up for the things he promises, which is the quiet reason he latches on to Carl.
5. What badge is Russell trying to earn when he meets Carl?
Assisting the Elderly
It is the one badge he lacks, so he knocks on Carl's door offering help, and Carl sends him off hunting a snipe he believes imaginary. At the ceremony Carl stands in for his absent father and awards him the Ellie badge, a grape soda cap.
6. What lifts Carl's house into the sky?
Helium balloons
Pixar animated more than ten thousand balloons in the liftoff, each bumping its neighbors, though the number needed to lift a real house would be far higher. Carl fills them overnight and sends them up the chimney as the retirement-home van waits outside.
7. What destination does Carl want to reach?
Paradise Falls
Ellie's childhood drawing shows the house beside the falls, and Carl finally parks it there. The falls were modeled on Angel Falls in Venezuela and the flat-topped tepui mountains around it, which a Pixar team flew to and climbed for research.
8. What is the friendly golden dog called?
Dug
Dug is a golden retriever voiced by the co-director Bob Peterson, whose scratch recordings for story meetings turned into the finished performance. He greets Carl with 'I have just met you and I love you,' and loses every train of thought to a squirrel.
9. How can Dug speak to humans?
His collar translates his thoughts
Muntz built the collars so his pack could report to him, and they turn thought straight into speech, which is why the dogs talk in short declarative sentences and sudden squirrels. Alpha's is on the fritz, so the pack leader speaks in a helium squeak.
10. What name does Russell give the large colorful bird?
Kevin
Russell names it before anyone realizes the bird is a mother with chicks to get back to, and the name sticks anyway. It is the snipe Carl sent him to find as a joke, and the live specimen the old explorer in the airship has spent decades trying to catch.
11. Who is the famous explorer Carl admired as a boy?
Charles Muntz
Muntz was the newsreel hero of Carl's childhood, who came back from South America with a giant bird's skeleton, was accused of faking it and swore not to return without a live one. Carl and Ellie met playing at being him, and his slogan became theirs.
12. Who voices Charles Muntz?
Christopher Plummer
Plummer plays Muntz as a gracious host whose dinner talk curdles in a sentence from famous guests to suspicion of his visitors. He was nearly eighty when the film came out, and three years later won an Oscar for Beginners, then the oldest actor to do so.
13. What is Muntz's airship called?
The Spirit of Adventure
The dirigible is a flying museum, with the skeletons Muntz has collected hanging from the ceiling and a kitchen staffed by dogs. Carl and Russell fly it home at the end and park it over the ice cream parlor where they sit counting passing cars.
14. Who composed the film's Oscar-winning score?
Michael Giacchino
It was the first Pixar score to win the Oscar, and Giacchino also took the Golden Globe and two Grammys for it; the waltz under the married-life montage does most of the heavy lifting. Randy Newman and Thomas Newman were Pixar's earlier regulars.
15. What book contains Carl and Ellie's shared memories?
An adventure book
Ellie's scrapbook is labeled My Adventure Book, with a section headed Stuff I'm Going to Do that Carl has always assumed was left blank. When he finally turns the pages he finds photos of their marriage and a note telling him to go have a new adventure.
