Few narrative devices aid a film more than the montage.

From the training scenes in the Rocky films to Seth Rogan figuring his entire life out in Knocked Up to, I’m told, Bella Swan sitting at an open window as the months fly past in New Moon, montages are everywhere, overused even, a borderline lazy way to show what’s happened over a period of time without having to get down to the nitty-gritty details of writing dialogue or crafting individual scenes. Perhaps lazy is too pejorative. We’ll just say “easy-going” instead.

One thing montages almost never do is elicit genuine feeling. They might make you chuckle. They may briefly inspire you, though often in a fast-food sort of way. What they won’t make you do is feel invested or want to cry.

Or, I should say, that used to be the case, before Disney’s Up.

Early in the computer-animated film, which grossed almost $300 million in theaters following its late-May 2009 release, there is a four-minute montage of the shared lives of protagonist Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) and his wife Ellie. The montage starts on their wedding day and proceeds through the entirety of their lives together: buying a house, painting a house, saving money, spending money, finding out terrible news and dealing with it; in general, moving through the entirety of their married lives together, from marriage on into their golden years.

In those four minutes, viewers enjoy the ups and downs of fifty years of marriage between two adorable animated characters, and the emotional weight this montage carries by its end, by the time the music stops and we pick up with Carl alone in the present day, is devastating.

Have you ever cried during a computer-animated movie? During any animated movie? For reasons unrelated to the death by shotgun of an animal character’s mother?

And now another, more essential question: have you ever cried at the end of a montage? Any montage? Ever?

I don’t even feel bad or weird admitting that I did while watching Up. You have to see this thing. Somehow this film, and it’s difficult to describe exactly how, affects the viewer in the most genuine and human of ways. There is more true emotional impact resulting from this animated movie than one featuring people I’ve seen in years.

Yes there are chase scenes, and a diabolical villain who wants to harm our main characters. Everything is cute. Dogs aplenty. Lessons to be learned. But none of that is what Up is about.

The early montage launches us into the center of the stilted emotional life of Carl, and throughout the film we watch him deal with the presence of the past, with the weight of memory, and the ultimate folly of allowing what used to be to color what still is.

The aforementioned adorability of the central characters, computer-generated though they are, plays a role in developing connection with them. The folks at Disney know what they’re doing on this front. But that aside, the filmmakers took a movie about an old man and a Boy Scout journeying to South America in a house held aloft by thousands of helium balloons and made it a potent meditation on life, love, death, and moving on within a given situation.

And the strength, the emotional authority, of this movie comes largely from that early montage. It really is something. Sets up the entire film that follows, and delivers its own emotional haymaker in the process.

Some of the most exciting things being done in movies these days happen in computer-animated films. But who would have guessed that some of the most palpable emotions, the most nostalgically bittersweet and sad movie of the year, in fact, would come from the animated sector?

If you’re looking for something good to watch with the family after pounding on Turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes this Thanksgiving, then this is the movie.  Just make sure to have some tissues handy.