Carl Fredricksen, a 78-year-old crank, believes that life has passed him by. To keep the promise he made to his late wife, he decides to pursue his dream of a grand adventure by tying thousands of balloons to his house and lifting off into the wilds of South America. Not even a mile into his journey, he discovers that he has inadvertently brought along an extremely talkative and irrepressibly cheerful 8-year-old boy named Russell.