Hero Essay or Whatever
The Epic Hero’s Cycle and Up The 2009 Disney film Up is about Mr. Frederickson’s long anticipated journey for adventure. As a young boy, Carl Frederickson idolizes the famous explorer, Charles Muntz. He enjoys spending most of his time watching documentaries and researching Muntz’s latest expeditions. On his way home from watching the latest documentary, Carl meets a buoyant young girl named Ellie, who is ardent about the same explorer as well. They both immediately share a connection upon their first encounter; their thirst for adventure keeps them together for a long time. As the two grow older, Carl and Ellie marry each other and build their own house together. They keep one special promise: to save up enough money to go to Paradise Falls in South America one day, together. Old age inevitably looms into their lives and tragedy strikes when Ellie becomes ill. Unfortunately, she passes away, leaving Mr. Frederickson a lonely, depressed, old man. After analyzing the events that occur from this point of the movie to the ending credits, one realizes the movie may be applied to Joseph Campbell’s Epic Hero Cycle. Carl Frederickson now lives an organized, prosaic life in the same house he built with Ellie. His constant mundane routine has never been interrupted until the government enforced industrialization in his neighborhood. Construction workers collaborating on an edifice next door had accidentally wrecked Carl’s mailbox he and Ellie made when they had just finished constructing their new house. Mr. Frederickson impulsively hits the construction worker on the head with his cane, which he later goes to court for being accused of a “public menace” (Up). The court acceded to evict Carl from his home, giving him a few days to pack his bags because he was to be sent to Shady Oaks Nursing Home. The eviction is the event in the film which acts as the summons to bring Carl from his boring ordinary world into a new and exciting one. Carl contrives an escape plan; he