The Pizza Planet truck appears three times in the film, once early when the house first takes off and is floating over town. When Carl lowers Russell out the window, you can see it parked outside. You can also see it parked by the curb right after the house passes the window washer. At the end, when they are eating ice cream, you can see it off to the left in the parking lot.
The theater from the short film, Presto, is used when Charles Muntz reveals the bird's skeleton.
The ball from the short film, Luxo Jr., is seen when Carl's house passes by a little girl's bedroom.
If you look really hard at some of the construction equipment on the construction site surrounding Carl's house, you might notice the Buy n Large logo, the fictional corporation from WALL•E. Also, the numbers on one of the machines reads L-R 1572, which is Up lighting director Lou Romano’s birthday (April 15, 1972).
When Carl is buying tickets to Venezuela, the "Burbank" font (commonly used in Disney Canada's Club Penguin) appears in a sign in which reads "Brazil" and another identical one next to it reading "Peru" in a gold color.
The Anglerfish from Finding Nemo appears during Carl and Muntz's fight when Muntz strikes one of his exhibits with his sword.
At one point in the movie, during the scene when everyone is looking up at Carl’s floating house, a man in a green striped shirt resembling Steve from the children’s series Blue's Clues can be seen.
In-Jokes
A113 is the number of the courtroom that Carl is summoned to.
Dug's knocking the controls over and tilting the blimp is a direct shadowing of WALL•E, in which AUTO rotates the Axiom in an attempt to stop him from sending the ship to Earth. The Up version makes more sense, because there is gravity on Earth. Tilting a blimp will topple stuff over, but tilting a spaceship which clearly has its own gravity field, should have no effect in zero-gravity.
In real life, hunters prank each other by challenging them to kill a snipe, which doesn't exist, but sounds real enough to be some kind of bird. It's even a common Boy Scout rite-of-passage. That was also the standard fake "snipe" call. Normally, the victim is given a bag or pillowcase to catch it in. Kevin, however, bears no resemblance to a snipe.
The dogs check their communication similar to the Rebels on the start of the attack on the Death Star.
Dogs Playing Poker
Though instead of "Red Leader, standing by," it's "Gray leader, checking in," due to the fact that dogs are unable to see red. Also, Star Wars is shown on a movie theater marquee during the end credits.
The computer shown in the end credits bears an uncanny resemblance to an Apple computer. Steve Jobs is a co-founder of Pixar.
When Russell is trying to break onto the Spirit of Adventure, he passes a window where a bunch of dogs are playing poker. This is a reference to the painting "Dogs Playing Poker."
In one scene, when the dogs fall into the river while attempting to capture Kevin the bird, a "robotic" version of the Wilhelm scream can be heard.
Other Trivia
At the beginning of the film, Carl is 9-years-old while Muntz is 23. At the end of the film, Carl is 78 and Muntz is 92.[1]
Kevin is probably an animated version of a prehistoric bird that lived about 6 to 10 thousand years ago.
Pixar employees visited Sacramento Zoo and sketched the Himalayan monal pheasant, due to its colorful feathers, for future references in the creation of Kevin.[2]
In Japan, the film is called カールじいさんの空飛ぶ家 (meaning "Grandpa Carl's Flying House").[3] The name bears an uncanny resemblance to Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle.
The license plate of the ambulance at the start of the film is "1934," which is the year Disney began work on its first feature length animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
According to the director's commentary, there are 10,297 balloons used to lift Carl's house. In actuality, the Pixar folks calculated it would take over 26.5 million balloons to lift such a house.
This is the second Pixar film to be released in May, after Finding Nemo.
When Carl pushes the stuff from his house onto Paradise Falls, the stuff remains there for the remainder of the movie. However, when the last shot of Up is showing Carl's house on Paradise Falls, the stuff is nowhere to be found. There is some speculation that the house landed in front of the stuff, since it was in a pile.
Up is the second animated movie to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award (the first was Beauty and the Beast).
The names Carl and Ellie Fredricksen appear on a postcard attached to a board in Andy's room in Toy Story 3.
This film marks the first Pixar feature film to be released in 3D.
This film marks Pete Docter's only Pixar film so far not to have different music accompany the logos at the beginning.
The commercial that Carl is watching on his TV right before we first meet Russell is a real commercial, and a funny one too because the man talking mistakes a butterfly for a horse.
Carl's line, "Take a bath, hippie!", is similar to Sarge's line, "Take a car wash, hippie!".
In the credits, some of the pictures relate to the crediting (Directed By: Russell walking Carl across the street; Music By: Dug howling, Carl playing glasses, Russel playing trumpet; Story Supervisor: Carl telling a scary story at a campfire; Film Editor: Russell and Carl go to see Star Wars in theaters; Production Designer: Dug and Russell drawing with chalk; Supervising Technical Director: Russell trying to teach Carl how to use a computer; Production Manager: Dug and his mate and all their children, of whom they PRODUCED; Directors of Photography, Camera, Lighting: pictures from a picture booth of Carl, Russell, and Dug; Shading Art Director: Carl and Russell making shadow puppets; Sound Designer: Carl and Russell talking through tin cans).
Up has the simplest DVD release features of any Pixar film, consisting of just the film, and its 2 tie-in shorts, Partly Cloudy and Dug's Special Mission, and nothing else. However, the Blu-Ray version contained more bonus material.
The priest at Carl's and Ellie's marriage has the same character model as the gynecologist who diagnosed Ellie as infertile.
SpongeBob SquarePants parodied this movie in the episode "The Main Drain" by having balloon-shaped bubbles attached to Patrick Star's rock, thus lifting his house.
The special collar used on pets with an injury to stop them injuring themselves further is formally known as an Elizabethan collar, but because of Up, it is now more commonly called a "Cone of Shame".
Up single-handedly changed the meaning of "squirrel" from "hide" to "be distracted."
In the movie, after Carl says, "So long, boys!", he says, "I'll send you a postcard from Paradise Falls!", but in the trailers, he simply blows a raspberry.
This film marks the only installment in the Up franchise to be released during Ed Asner's lifetime, as the miniseries Dug Days premiered posthumously, just three days following his death on August 29, 2021.
