Ornament Review: Up 10th Anniversary - 2019 Hallmark Release

Stars: 4 out of 5

Pros: Looks great, sound clip adds to fun

Cons: Very hard to add the batteries

The Bottom Line:

Celebrate 10 years

With great looking ornament

Batteries are hard

Celebrating 10 Years with a Magic Ornament

Pixar’s wonderful movie Up celebrated 10 years in 2019.  (How can that movie be so old?)  As it often does, Hallmark celebrated this milestone with an ornament.  It’s one I’d been wanting for a while for this movie, but one aspect didn’t quite work like it should have.

We’ve gotten some ornaments of the characters over the years, but we had yet to get a Hallmark ornament of the house floating with all the balloons above it.  That’s exactly what we get this year.  The yellow house is, frankly, overwhelmed by the balloons above it.  And the balloons are multi-colored, just as they should be.  Okay, so the balloon part is really a solid plastic part with parts of spheres sticking off the main mass, but anyone can easily figure out what it really is.  The ornament uses a dangle element, with the house dangling from the balloons.  This makes it look much more like the house did in the movie, but it also means you can’t set this ornament out to be displayed.  You must hang it, but fortunately, it looks great when you are hanging it.  As far as the size of the house compared to all the balloons, the ornament captures how the two looked compared to each other when we look a look from far away.

As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, I love how this ornament looks.  It is a perfect representation of what I wanted to represent this part of the movie.  And I love the movie, so this is important to me.

Even better, this ornament is a magic ornament.  When you stick the button batteries in the compartment in the balloons and then press the button, you are treated to a 30 second clip of the main theme of the movie.  The instant you hit the button you’ll recognize exactly what the music is from.

So far, this is sounding like a fantastic ornament, right?  I was looking forward to adding it to my collection from the moment Hallmark announced it was coming.

The issue came when I had to add the batteries to the ornament.  The way the compartment is situated in the balloons, it is almost impossible to put them in.  Seriously, it took me several minutes to get them added, and usually I can add the batteries in less than a minute.  Considering, you shouldn’t store the batteries in an ornament, you then have to go through this each year.  As much as I love the magic element of this ornament, this is a major drawback for me.  I don’t know why they made it so hard to add the batteries.  You’d think they would have tried it out and made sure it wasn’t so hard.

But battery issues aside, this is still a good ornament.  I might not enjoy the music every year, but I will certainly enjoy this ornament.