Up (2009 Pete Docter, Bob Peterson)

The first eleven, silent minutes of this film - a life story - is absolutely wonderful, so cinematic, and so moving. In fact the whole film is very cinematic and behaves more like a live action film than an animation - much to its credit. It even looks properly lit.

Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai and Bob Peterson are the main voices.

It also seems to have a lot going on in the deceptively simple story, such as letting go and starting afresh.

The music by Michael Giacchino won Oscar and it was of course also the winner for best animated film. The screenplay and sound editing also were nominated. (The best sound effect is when the boy is dragged along the airship's window.)

On that opening:

Bob Peterson originally wrote a series of very short scenes, two or three on a page with dialogue, and the characters were completing each other's sentences and other snippets that showed how well matched they were. And as we went into storyboard, Ronnie Del Carmen, who was our head of story, took on that sequence at the beginning and said, "This would be really great if it was silent." We sort of resisted for a while, but it was a classic case of, as I believe Mark Twain said, "I didn't have time for a short letter, so I wrote you a long one." Over time, we were able to know what we absolutely needed to see in the scene, and what we could cut out.

Thanks to LA Times for the complete discussion