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Watching Pixar movies provides a moment to escape reality and the nitpicky details of life. In the Pixar world, nothing has to make logical sense. And that’s true of the movie Up (2009).

If by some fluke you haven’t seen the movie, the plot is fairly simple. A boy and girl fall in love and plan to move to this very specific place in South America. When the girl (who is then an eldery woman) passes away, the boy (then an elderly man) decides to pull to plug and go. How he chooses to go defies all logic, or so we thought. He uses balloons to lift his house and carry him to South America.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The animation studio is usually not looking to create a plausible story but this one is more feasible than some might have originally thought.

Corridor Crew took a deep dive into the movie’s premise and determined how many balloons it would actually take to lift the house. In an interview with Corridor Crew, Pete Doctor, Up‘s director, actually admits to attempting the calculation before pitching the idea of the film. His calculation was that it would take 26.5 million balloons to carry a house.

Photo: Pixabay

Realizing they couldn’t fit that many balloons onto the screen, the Pixar team settled on a nice round number: 10,000. If they had decided to adhere to the laws of physics, the animation process would have been essentially impossible.

According to Corridor Crew, other calculations estimated that it would take around 31,150,319 balloons to lift the house. However, it wouldn’t be feasible to use 31 million party balloons, but they were able to simulate what that would look like.

Photo: YouTube / Corridor Crew
Photo: YouTube / Corridor Crew
Photo: YouTube / Corridor Crew
Photo: YouTube / Corridor Crew

The computer simulation that is used in this video is an impressive one. We never could have imagined 31 million balloons before we saw this clip. If one old man had to blow up this many balloons by himself, he would have passed out within an hour. All things considered, we are glad that Pixar decided to take a less realistic route with this story.

Watch the video below:

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