The one thing you could never accuse Michael Giacchino of is being typecast into a certain movie genre. From Cloverfield’s ‘Roar’ to the new big screen outings of Star Trek and Land of the Lost, the composer is getting the chance to flex lots of his different muscles, and while the score to Up can’t be seen as unique in his canon of work, it’s a superior piece of work. This is Giacchino’s third feature score for a Pixar movie after the John Barry-esque The Incredibles and the Parisian delights of Ratatouille. So, third time’s a charm for this new Pixar movie, and charming is a suitable word to describe his latest work.

Up is the animated voyage of old widower Carl (a note-perfect Ed Asner) who decides to uproot his house and fly it trans-America with the aid of balloons. He’s joined by chubby Boy Scout Russell and crosses swords with intrepid explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). The story follows Carl’s physical and emotional journey there and back again, so on the face of it, not much scope for the epic adventure of MI:III or Star Trek? Read on…

The main theme (‘Up with Titles’) immediately takes us back to the Golden Age of the 30s or 40s, chronicling the younger Carl. From then on it really is variations on a theme, reimagined with muted trumpet, ragtime piano or any other instrument Giacchino wants to throw into the mix, perhaps most successfully in ‘Giving Muntz the Bird’. But don’t worry, this score isn’t mono-thematic, and it turns to the adventurous with the dashing ‘Carl Goes Up’.

This action theme gets further increasingly-frantic reworking in ‘Escape from Muntz Mountain’ and ‘Seizing the Spirit of Adventure’. And then, by the end, his wanderlust sated, Carl’s theme appears again, but this time it’s more triumphant, optimistic and brimming with a joie de vivre, with all former suggestions of melancholy blown away by the trip in the clouds.

Explorer Muntz gets his own theme, first as a crackly vocal version in ‘The Spirit of Adventure’ and more prominently in ‘The Explorer Motel’ and ‘Seizing the Spirit of adventure’, while Russell comes to the fore in Latin jazz-lite of ‘The Small Mailman Returns’. It’s to Giacchino’s credit that even the little people get their musical moments in the sunshine, making their entrances with simple motifs that develop across the movie before competing each against one another in moments of high adventure. Every dog has his day in this score, even Muntz’ mutts in ‘Canine Conundrum’.

Soundtrack geeks will be delighted that Giacchino is continuing the Pixar track title in-jokes that he injected into The Incredibles and Ratatouille – incorporating the title into the end credit track title (‘The Incredits’, ‘Endcreditouilles’ and now ‘Up with End Credits’), and having a track called ‘something’ dash (‘100 Mile Dash’, ‘100 Rat Dash’ and now ‘3 Dog Dash’).

The three final tracks on the album are fairly tenuous sound effects credited to Skywalker Sound (does anyone actually want these?), but even after taking these three superfluous minutes off the running time you still get 50 minutes of ‘proper’ score. And what of this release only being available as a download? Whether or not we like it, this is happening more and more often, and for such an old-fashioned score this modern treatment seems a very retrograde step.