Who composed the musical score for Up?

Michael Giacchino composed the musical score for Up. His music gives the film its emotional architecture, using recurring themes to track Carl and Ellie’s relationship, Carl’s grief, Russell’s optimism, and Charles Muntz’s transformation from celebrated explorer into antagonist.

Giacchino had already worked with Pixar on The Incredibles and Ratatouille, making Up his third Pixar feature. Director Pete Docter wanted the music to carry strong emotion, and Giacchino built the score around character-based themes rather than treating the film as a sequence of disconnected action cues. “Married Life,” associated with Carl and Ellie, became especially famous for conveying decades of love and loss with very little dialogue.

The score was released digitally on May 26, 2009, shortly before the film opened. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, becoming the first Pixar score to win that award. A frequent confusion is Randy Newman, another major Pixar composer; Newman wrote scores and songs for films such as Toy Story, while Giacchino scored Up.