Film Theory: Pixar's Up, How Many Balloons Does It Take To Lift A House?

magician and overall nobody asked you to do that stunt artist david blaine recently made headlines when he used balloons to lift himself nearly five miles above the arizona desert before skydiving back down earth sure that's a daring and cool stunt i suppose but people comparing it to the movie up are getting a little carried away if you ask me i mean if he really wanted to do the up trick properly he would have landed from that skydive and then revealed that he had a boy scout with him the entire time now that is a trick [Music] hello internet welcome to film theory the show that helps your knowledge of movies and tv sort of new heights before bursting your balloons by ruining your favorite franchises i can't help it i'm like life's pointy little needle of sadness let's ignore that ominous foreshadowing for a moment though and consider the majesty of pixar with almost no new movies coming out in 2020 i've had a fantastic opportunity to revisit some old classics no not the bygone classics from the golden age of film or under-appreciated futuristic anime or even obscure french documentaries about potato picking ah leglen you will always remain in my watch later playlist nope i've been watching old pixar movies haven't exactly kept my love of pixar secret on this channel but sometimes it can be tricky to talk about their movies i've actually wanted to make a theory about up for a long time but every time i start to watch the movie i get so dehydrated from weeping after that first 10 minutes that i have to stop if you've never made it past those first 10 minutes either let me spoiler alert summarize the movie so we can get on with today's theory shall we and up an old man named carl uses balloons to fly his and his late wife's house to their dream adventure destination of paradise falls in south america along with an annoying boy scout and a talking dog wow it is a remarkably easy movie to summarize now the obvious theory about up is about whether you can actually make a house fly with balloons and while a number of videos have attempted to answer this even going so far as to build a miniature of carl's house and fly it i've never been satisfied with the answer or the methodology or the math that's been used and i've also been left unsatisfied when everyone fails to answer the other obvious question here even if you do manage to get the house in the air is there any chance that it could possibly make it to another continent i guess when you want something done right you have to do it yourself and that my friends is the plan for today's theory so my friends strap in like david blaine because today we're going up up and away the first question that we have to dig into is the obvious one whether carl could actually have floated his house using balloons as we see in the movie and i recognize that i am far from the first person to actually try to answer this david blaine demonstrated that you can do it with a person and the national geographic show how hard can it be proved that you could do it with a house so i gotta say the house that they built was more of a house-shaped box than something that people could actually live in which is gonna come with a lot of stuff that's gonna weigh the whole project down the theoretical physics behind it isn't all that complicated since helium is lighter than air a balloon creates a small lifting force and if you get enough helium in enough balloons yeah you could theoretically lift anything a house a yacht even the statue of liberty the real question is how many balloons you'd need and that one requires a bit more work i've seen estimates of this figure online ranging from wired's claim that the job would be done in about a hundred thousand balloons to the director of up pete docter saying that the figure they arrived at was somewhere in the vicinity of 23 and a half million balloons a bit of a difference there's a you know margin of error nice try there guys but here on film theory you only get partial credit if you don't show your work so i wanted to do the math for myself along with a bit of testing from our pal austin over on the science on game theory first question how much does carl's house weigh there are actually a lot of considerations depending on the materials that you use to make the house but generally speaking older houses are made from heavier materials carl and ellie renovate a house known as a queen anne style house which are what you think of as your classic victorian houses think high-pitched roofs tower structures or bay windows and porches with ornate lattice work called gingerbread trim we can also see that carl's house has a heavy slate roof that's why you're getting that scalloped pattern up there on the top of the building this house was probably built in the early 20th century at the latest given that it was falling apart when carl and ellie made in it in 1939. according to one construction company a good estimate for the weight of a two-story house like carl's is 275 pounds per square foot though we have to subtract the weight of the house's foundation from that because when house lifts up you don't see the foundation coming with it luckily the up house now exists a replica was actually built in the suburbs of salt lake city utah and covers 2 800 square feet so even if we imagine it having a heavy foundation of 200 000 pounds or 91 000 kilograms we've still got ourselves a weight of 570 000 260 000 kilograms that we need to lift using nothing but balloons so as you can imagine we're gonna need a lot of balloons so that leads us to our second question how much weight can a helium balloon lift obviously this question depends on the kind of balloon both mr street magic and the people of national geographic opted for big meteorological balloons but if we want to recreate up we're talking about latex party city rub it on your head and stick it to the wall kind of balloons on average one of these balloons can fit about 9 liters of helium in it which should have the ability to lift about 11 grams of mass we also have to start subtracting the weight of the non-house things that the helium is also lifting the balloon itself weighs about 2 grams and if we imagine carl using very thin fishing line for the strings which i chose because the ribbon that you get on party balloons would actually be too heavy at the lengths that carl needs that's going to add about another 0.7 grams for a 50 foot length string thus each balloon has the ability to lift about 8.3 grams if we're not accounting for any other outward forces like the friction of the balloons rubbing together converting the total weight of the house from 570 000 pounds to about 258 million 547 thousand 651 grams we get that carl is gonna need a grand total of 31 million 150 319 balloons to get that house off the ground having trouble envisioning what that number of balloons would look like well here's some footage from balloon fest which happened in cleveland ohio just a couple of miles from where i was born two months from before i was born in september of 1986 in an attempt to break the guinness world record for the most balloons released at one time what you're seeing in that news coverage right there is one and a half million helium balloons so carl's house would need that times 20 probably blocking out the sun in the process also did cleveland's balloon fest have as nice of an ending as up nope guinness refused to recognize it as a world record and the balloons hampered a search and rescue mission for two lost fishermen who wound up dead classic cleveland pulling a cleveland it's not funny that people died at all it's just such a cleveland move i love you guys we originated the rock and roll hall of fame and the ability to set rivers on fire because they're so polluted i'm originally from cleveland so i'm allowed to make that joke but cleveland is like the double baltic of cities i love you cleveland so much okay so theoretically you can lift your house into the sky if you have 30 million spare balloons lying around but that still doesn't confirm the events of the film because we have to answer our other major question here could carl really fly the house to paradise falls unfortunately when you have 30 million balloons attached to your house shower curtain isn't gonna be super effective at steering it like trying to steer your car by sticking your arm out the window so carl is gonna be at the mercy of wind patterns but there is some indication that the wind might actually end up blowing carl's house toward paradise falls paradise falls as location doesn't really exist in real life but it's based on venezuela's angel falls the tallest waterfall in the world it's unclear where in the united states carl is from but from anywhere in the lower 48 he's gonna be needing to be blown south and east landing somewhere near the equator the eastern direction for weather is pretty typical north of 30 degrees latitude which is pretty much all of america the predominant wind pattern is the subtropical jet stream which blows from west to east opposite the direction that the earth is spinning in order to go south the house needs to get caught up in what's called a hadley cell which is a rotating mass of air that occurs between the equator and about 30 degrees latitude air from the equator heats up rises high in the atmosphere and moves towards the poles at which point the air cools down sinks and moves back toward the equator it's certainly lucky for carl's house to end up around paradise falls but when you look at the weather patterns it's not impossible and if you think it's impossible for helium balloons to travel that kind of distance there's actually anecdotal evidence to suggest otherwise in 2013 a british student released helium balloons with letters attached to him into the sky only to have one recovered in australia over 10 000 miles away so who knows maybe that thunderstorm in the movie blew carl's house right into the hadley cell it needed to land it right at paradise's falls's feet should have just stuck with what the script said that moment instead of trying to spin it off into what i thought i was gonna say and then it didn't make a whole lot of sense because waterfalls don't have feet and he doesn't wind up at the feet of the falls he winds up at the top of the falls it's stupid it was a stupid attempt to add living so yes you can lift a house with balloons and those balloons can fly halfway across the world does that mean that carl's planning up is actually kinda when you squint at it plausible well there's one final teensy tiny little problem you know what's really gonna stand in carl's way beyond depleting the world's supply of latex and helium and having to get tremendously lucky with weather patterns the cost see we know from carl and ellie's montage at the beginning of the movie that they're not exactly rolling in the dough they have to break that jug of change over and over and over again to make ends meet and even just thinking about it's getting me to tear up suck it up matt you have to talk about brutal cold science but it's not like either of them is sitting on a trust fund and uh buying and filling up that many balloons is gonna get a little expensive helium costs roughly a hundred and nineteen dollars per thousand cubic feet best price i can find on balloons works out to be a little less than five cents per balloon not to mention the fact that we're gonna be needing almost 300 000 miles of fishing line to hold all of them together when you crunch all of those numbers the cost for the 280 million liters of helium that you need is one million one hundred and seventy eight thousand one hundred seventy bucks the balloons themselves are gonna cost you 1.5 million bucks and the fishing line ends up running you two million three hundred and eighty eight thousand hundred and ninety one dollars for a grand total cost of 5 million 108 302 you can't put a price on a meaningful romantic gesture but if it costs you 5.1 million dollars maybe look into buying some nearby real estate instead and before any of my billionaire viewers out there get the idea that they could just do this themselves consider the following if it takes you 10 seconds to blow up and tie each of those balloons you'd need to spend almost 10 years non-stop inflating balloons to pull off the stunt sorry to burst your balloon but hey that's just a theory a film theory and if you enjoyed this episode make sure you hit that subscribe button we just crossed the amazing milestone of nine million subscribers and we're one million away from getting that diamond play button guys it would validate this channel so much so please if you're not subscribed consider hitting that subscribe button it doesn't really do a whole lot to change how you engage with youtube in general so help out the channel at no cost to yourself and honestly if you enjoyed this video we got tons more like it on the channel and we got a lot more coming down the way to wind up 2020 so the year might suck but hopefully these videos make you feel a little bit happier give you a little bit of a distraction help remind you of movies that are out and might make you feel a little bit better about life so hit the subscribe button we're here for you we appreciate it when you're here for us i'll see you all next week

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 2,350,833

Rating: 4.9577813 out of 5

Keywords: up, up movie, pixar, pixar movie, pixar up, up pixar, pixar theory, disney, disney theory, up full movie, carl from up, doug from up, doug up, up dog, up scene, carl up, disney pixar up, disney up, disney pixar, up balloons, up house, film theorists, film theory, matpat, film theory up

Id: f2JE5GAUgTk

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/zullendale]

You know, this was a fun video, but (and I say this as a loving fan) it felt a bit incomplete. MatPat only identifies 3 major obstacles Carl would face in his journey: the weight of the house, wind patterns, and cost. However, there is so much more standing in his way.

The first major thing he’ll face is the weather. The ideal weather conditions for Carl’s flight are clear skies and (probably) slightly warm temperatures. If he faces any kind of rain, hail, or something similar, he’s probably screwed unless he prepares for that (though I have no idea how he could). Temperature would probably be an even bigger problem. If he’s flying at too high of an altitude, the cold would cause the helium molecules to be less active, and condensation would form on the balloons and house roof, likely causing him to descend. Things are much worse if it’s too hot, however.

Another big obstacle Carl faces is a lack of important resources of amenities. I don't know how long it would take for him to get from the US to Venezuela. Depending on things like aerodynamics, wind speed, starting location, and other factors, it could probably take days, weeks, or months. That's time Carl would have to account for when stocking up on key resources. He'd probably not be able to make pit stops, so he'd need to bring all the food, water he'd need for the entire journey. There's also a lot of things he would just not have at all, like a working fridge, air conditioning, and (most importantly) working plumbing. Also, without electricity and internet, navigation would be pretty much impossible whenever it gets cloudy.

Interestingly enough, the obstacles MatPat didn't mention were the literal obstacles standing (flying) in Carl's way. There will be things like birds, bugs, and aircraft that could crash into the house and/or pop balloons. He'd have to dodge all the big flying objects (and stay far enough from them so he doesn't face turbulence), and probably do something to the balloons to make them resistant to popping caused by the smaller flying objects.

Probably the largest obstacle preventing Carl from getting to Paradise/Angel Falls is what lies below. Specifically, the countries and their governments. If he flies the Gulf and the Carribean Sea, he'd definitely enter Cuban air space, with a decent chance of flying into Hatian, Dominican, Bahamian and/or Jamaican air space. It would get much worse if he goes through land, which would likely happen if he starts from somewhere in the western side of the US. In that case, he'd definitely go into Mexico, Nicaragua and Colombia, with a high chance of going into Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Colombia. He'd have to deal with the governments of every nation he flies over, in addition to the American government. Frankly, if none of the other conditions I've listed kill him, he'd probably get shot down before even making it halfway.

So, assuming he gets nothing but clear skies and slightly warm days, he has all the food, water, and medicines he needs, he's prepared to live and travel without all the amenities he couldn't have in the skies, he doesn't run into anything in the air, he's not bothered by any of the governments of the countries he flies over, and he makes it safely to his destination, he still has one major issue to deal with: figuring out how to survives once he lands. In the film, Paradise Falls appears to be in the middle of the South American jungle, far away from any sort of civilization. This man (who's clearly well past his 60's, likely around his early 80's) would have to survive in this environment alone (remember that Russell and Dug were unexpected stowaways). He'd need to be able to hunt and gather, or farm, all with back problems and a walking stick. He'd need to figure out how to get clean water, and probably need to either have enough medication to last until he dies, figure out how to make natural substitutes, or learn to live without them (the viability of this option depends on exactly what he needs them for). He'd also go absolutely nuts, seeing as he has no way to meet his mental and social needs.

Then again, for such an old man, who's shown to be very miserable and alone at the beginning of the movie, not meeting his needs of survival might kind of be what he's going for. For a man who's shown to be stuck in his old ways, refusing to make any changes in his life (he literally refuses to let anything in his property change from the moment Ellie dies) to suddenly embark on a life-changing adventure of that scale at that stage in his life seems very strange to me. I could see him attempting this a sort of "last hurrah", maybe trying to go out on the ultimate high note, on his own terms, rather than to go slowly in a city and country where he's clearly depressed.

IDK, honestly, this is all just me word-vomiting immediately after watching the video. MatPat, if you're reading this, maybe you can use this to make a part 2? If you do please credit me, and know you have every permission to make fun of my username. I know it's weird, I started using it when I was 11 and never stopped.

[u/Edvarius]

I'll admit I haven't seen the film, and I have, like, no education in this area, so sorry if this is something that actually does get addressed or is irrelevant, but what about structural integrity? All the pictures I've seen of the Up House have the balloons coming together to lift at a single point. But houses are not one large object, they are a combination of many, many smaller parts, held together with various means to create something that seems whole. If all of those balloons are tied off to a single point, or even just one general area, that could create a lot of stress as while that portion of the house is receiving a lot of lift, the rest of the structure is still feeling the full effect of gravity. As well the thing is being lifted off of it's foundation. Would that have an effect on the integrity? It seems like it might. I dunno, like I said, don't actually know anything about this kind of thing.