If you learn one thing from Pixar, it is how to write without fear.  The folks over there don’t care how their ideas sound to focus groups.  They know without a doubt that they can tell a good story and that’s what they do.

I mean, look at their latest creation, Up.  I saw it this weekend and it is a wonderful piece of storytelling.  But I’m surprised it got made in the first place.  After all, this is an animated movie with a 78-year-old main character.  And he acts like a 78 year old.  And he stays 78 through the entire movie (though I’m sure some executive at Disney wondered why he couldn’t turn into a teenager once the action got started).

Oh, and the premise.  Well, it is all based on the melancholy of losing a spouse and reconsidering the missed opportunities in your life.  The beautiful opening montage lays out an entire life, including the pain of infertility and death.  Yes, this is an animated kids’ movie, not some French art-house meditation on existentialism.

But that’s the thing about Pixar.  They take those themes that are usually relegated to the Oscar-hopeful drama and the indie fringe and they put them front and center.  In the process, they make the candy-colored package that wraps around the ideas highly entertaining for all ages.

That is an amazing artistic accomplishment.

My description so far may make Up seem like a downer, but it also has a very funny eight-year-old foil, a ridiculously slapsticky giant bird, dogs with electronic collars that allow them to talk and a house that floats to South America courtesy of thousands of balloons.  I would just point out that any one of these elements would probably be innovative enough to drive an entire movie, but Pixar puts them all together (and countless others) in a creative stew that is mind-boggling.

I’ll say it again.  This movie shouldn’t work.  But it does.  Perfectly.

Pixar started with great movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc., which are wonderful but now seem almost conventional compared to more recent work.  After all, toys coming to life and monsters under the bed had been done before, but in the hands of the Pixar team these concepts were fresh again.  The same can be said of the quest in Finding Nemo and the reimagining of superheroes in The Incredibles.  The elements were familiar, but Pixar recombined them better than anyone had before or since.

Just so you know, my wife and I have seen every Pixar movie in the theater (except for A Bug’s Life and Cars), mostly without kids.  I’m always amazed by adults that have not seen them, given that they tend to be the best movies out there, animated or not.

I did see Cars on video and I thought that the Pixar streak was coming to an end.  True, it was still a big hit.  But it lacked the spark of the others, the ability to put together a movie that transcended what came before.  Cars was a boring cartoon for kids.

Now I don’t know if the folks at Pixar felt the same way, but ever since Cars they seem to have decided to chuck all caution to the wind and challenge themselves to achieve the impossible with the unlikliest of material.

Ratatoille started the trend.  A movie about a rat that wants to cook is going to be hard enough to sell, but then to hinge the entire operation on a climax that requires a villian to have a Proustian moment of culinary revelation is almost reckless.  And yet when that villian — who happens to be  food critic — takes that bite of the rat’s creation and is transported back to childhood in yet another stunning montage, it is the best moment in the movie.

Last year, Pixar brought us Wall-E.  There is no talking for much of the film and the beginning takes place with a solitary character on a desolate wasteland that used to be Earth.  From there, it launches a scathing commentary on humankind’s propensity to waste and gluttony.  That should fall somewhere between Bergman and Fellini territory, and yet it doesn’t.

And now we have Up.

It might be that being so far ahead of the pack gets tiring and that leads to this restless need for Pixar to challenge itself with its subject matter.  But thinking outside the box must be exhausting too.  So next summer we get Toy Story 3, which I’m sure will be fun and a huge hit, but also gives Pixar a less worrisome entry for the summer season.  No one will question that it will be a success.  But I’m more interested in their 2011 entry, Newt, about the last male and female of an endangered species who are supposed to mate but don’t like each other.  An animated Scenes From a Marriage?  It shouldn’t work, but probably will.

Like I said, no fear.