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What's Up?: Balloon to the Rescue

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  • Accidental Innuendo: Guto looks and sounds like he's humping the couch at the start of the film.
  • Ethnic Scrappy: One of this movie's major points of contention is its unironic use of racist stereotypes as comedy, and more severely than in the previous film Little & Big Monsters to boot.
    • Outside of his annoying Stupid Evil behavior, Jean-Pierre is disliked for being a French Jerk stereotype, including speaking in an exaggerated accent and claiming that he only drinks wine.
    • While Ching-Ling is much more likable, he's also attracted criticism for his uncanny yellow-tinted skin, Chinese takeout T-shirt and introducing himself with a "made in China" joke.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Ching-Ling falls in love with Amanda because she's the only member of the family who treats him with any measure of civility and respect and isn't overtly and maliciously racist to him. Even her saying "arigato" to him at the beginning seems more out of ignorance than malice.
  • Fridge Horror: The gang uses an unnamed man's hot-air balloon to lift the house in lieu of the superpowered rock, but the man isn't shown to have joined them, nor is he ever seen again. Is he just left alone without a mode of transport in the middle of the Amazon rainforest?
  • Memetic Mutation: "I'm [nationality], we drink [stereotypical beverage]." This meme makes up 90% of the comment section of nearly every review video of this film on YouTube.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Jean-Pierre crosses it when he traps the family inside a cave to suffocate, and then digs himself further when he drugs the scientists and Guto, who are elders and a child respectively, with a sleeping drug.
  • Sequel Displacement: This film is better known than its predecessor Little & Big Monsters, and is often reviewed before that film by most online reviewers, if they know of or touch upon the latter at all. This is likely because Up is more popular than Monsters vs. Aliens.
  • Strangled by the Red String: Amanda reveals at the very end that she's dating Ching-Ling, while the two have only sparsely interacted before this point.
  • Squick: The TV news segment at the beginning of the film devolves into very creepy gushing over Amanda, who is in her mid-teens.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: Ching-Ling gains a lot of sympathy rather than laughter from the audience for being kind and helpful, yet is openly looked down on and disparaged by the heroes solely for his race.

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