Sometimes, monstrous creatures appear in the oddest of places. Disney/Pixar’s Up being one such example.
The mysterious animal fits in well with the monsters of cryptozoology and despite the goofy antics, has some biological foundation to its existence.
Though animal is never named in the series directly, beyond “Kevin”, but it is named indirectly for the purpose it serves and its general behavior.
The Bird, Kevin, is a Snipe.
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| Kevin |
Not the actually variety of bird, mind you, but the idea of one.
Symbolism
A “Snipe Hunt” is another way of saying a Wild Goose Chase. There’s dozens of variations, usually involving one experienced person talking a greenhorn into wasting their time and/or making a fool of themselves.
However, in this film, it’s more about chasing dreams, with the Snipe existing for each character. It hides what they really want in life, but they remain focused on it. Charles Muntz, the Villain, falls for the snipe hunt when his actual dream was exploration. The main character, Carl Frederickson, ends up focusing on fulfilling one of his and his wife’s dreams (getting their home on “Paradise Falls”) and also loses sight of what sparked that idea in the first place. Dog seeks the approval of his pack, but what he really wants is friends, and Russell is in a similar predicament, using Scouting to find a way to connect to his family—or a family, at any rate.
The villain never regains the sight of his dream, having been fooled by the snipe for far too long, and having his dream marred by ridicule and embarrassment.
Biology
For all the silliness of it, there’s some solid basis for the biology of Kevin, as well as his home. Though it draws inspiration from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, it also draws some of the land’s features from the inspiration for that novel, Mount Roraima.
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| Mount Roraima |
Normally, when a piece of land is isolated, the animal life reduces in size if they were large, or grows large if it was small. Plants also become greatly reduced at higher elevations. The actual Mount Roraima has a variety of small wild life and a flora primarily composed a unique species of heather, some bonetia, pitcher plants and algae. It’s extremely wet because it pierces Amazonian clouds, leaving an amphibian (a small frog) as the largest animal.
The plateau in Up is a bit lower to the ground. It has to be, for it to be sunny and have proper jungle in addition to open, rocky wastes and not be ruled by frogs.
Alright, on to Kevin.
Kevin is most likely a member of the Cariame family, related to a spectacular group of ground birds called Phorusrhacids (“Rag Thieves”).
Today, their only surviving example is the odd bird called the Seriema. These birds are predators, the Phorusrhacids being spectacular carnivores, dominating over mammals for 40 million years in South America. They were birds returning to their dinosaurian roots and hunting like dwarf tyrannosaurs. Some of them even atavistically regaining a claw or two on their wing.
Kevin is portrayed as primarily an herbivore, gathering fruit for the babies. But Kevin is nothing if not an opportunist.
Given the limited resources of the plateau, trying to eat a balloon, cane or tennis ball is quasi-natural, if very weird. However, the Phorusrhacids were powerful predators, and the modern Seriema is like the Secretary Bird of Africa, feeding on small animals and occasionally plants. Given the isolation of the plateau, it is likely that Kevin is an omnivore with a primarily herbivorous diet. As an aside, the obsession with chocolate is perfectly natural, given that cacao, the seeds chocolate is made from, are found in the Amazon Basin (and Mexico). If presented with small animals to eat (or an injured dog), it would not hesitate to tear it apart.
But how would such a bird tear anything apart? Its beak is not the curved hook of a hawk and its feet are not talons.
The Seriema only has a mild curve to its beak and weak claws on its feet as well. It’s method of dispatching prey is to smack it. The bird picks up prey in its bill and then slams it on a hard surface like a rock or a tree. The blows break the prey item apart bit by bit. A gruesome method for such a cute animal, isn’t it?
The bright coloration of Kevin indicates that, more likely, it is a male, rather than a female as the film indicates. Biologically, there’s no reason to have such coloration other than to display to attract a breeding partner, and in Birds, that’s the generally a male thing.
The bird also shows a great aptitude in climbing, which makes sense for the mountainous region it nest in. Ground dwelling birds have the continued problem of defending their nests, and being able to climb would be a wonderful asset.
And how it is currently thought birds first got into trees.
