What the HELL is What's Up? (A Racist Pixar Clone)

Review of What’s Up: Balloon to the Rescue

Saberspark reviews What’s Up: Balloon to the Rescue, a cheap animated film he describes as a near-unwatchable, racist knockoff of Pixar’s Up. The movies’ main similarity is a flying house, eventually lifted by a balloon; the rest of What’s Up is a muddled monster adventure.

Plot

The story follows a group of scientists and their young companion, Gudo, as a French explorer named Jean-Pierre persuades them to fly their laboratory toward the Amazon. Jean turns out to be a villain who wants to use a mysterious rock to control the world. After trapping the group, opening a portal, and unleashing monsters, he is pursued by the group as they chase the creatures across the globe and try to stop him.

The story’s twists include Jean drugging Gudo and the older scientists, while Gudo’s sunglasses somehow protect him from the rock’s mind control. In the finale, Jean is sent through the portal with the monsters, and the family more or less shrugs off the possibility that he might be eaten or stranded there.

Stereotypes and production

The film’s repeated ethnic and national stereotypes are the review’s biggest focus. Saberspark highlights racist jokes about a Chinese character named Ching Ling, including “Arigato” being mistaken for the right greeting, jokes about fortune cookies and Chinese food, and a closing gag that assumes Ching Ling can’t be smart.

The film also relies on a French caricature: Jean-Pierre insists that French people drink wine, while the characters repeatedly mock his accent and hygiene. Saberspark’s reaction is incredulous, especially as the casual insults keep resurfacing as running jokes.

He also criticizes the production, citing choppy voice acting, awkward dialogue, music that abruptly starts and stops, clumsy pacing, stiff animation, lazy backgrounds, and uninspired creature designs. Rather than being entertainingly bad, he says, the movie is simply boring. He identifies Video Brinquedo as the studio behind it, noting its history of making low-budget animated knockoffs, and concludes that What’s Up has no redeeming qualities.

Personalities featured

• Saberspark — The reviewer and narrator.
• Gudo — The young protagonist.
• Uncle Crum — One of the older scientists, whose racist remarks become a recurring gag.
• Amanda — The young woman in the group.
• Jean-Pierre Delacroix — The French explorer and antagonist.
• Ching Ling — The Chinese character repeatedly targeted by the film’s jokes.