Up, the new movie from Disney/Pixar, features Doug (actually, "Dug"), a typically enthusiastic Golden Retreiver, with an atypical gizmo. His collar is a special contraption that allows him to talk. Or, rather, it reads his mind and gives voice to his thoughts.

While there's a huge pack of dogs in the movie, Dug is the leading canine. Pixar's first big screen portrayal of a pooch was in "Toy Story," and featured the evil Pit Bull pal of Sid, the mean neighbor kid. To be honest, even though I loved Toy Story, the portrayal of the dog in Toy Story was awful. His joints didn't look right, he had no depth, and he didn't move like (even a cartoon version of) a dog. If he looked like anything in the real world, it was a rubber, dog-shaped chew toy that might have belonged to the real dog it was supposed to represent.

Pixar really pulled out all the stops creatively and technologically in this portrayal. Technology now allows them to procedurally animate every hair on Dug's considerable body. They also did a fantastic job giving Dug an amazingly true-to-form Golden Retreiver personality in over-the-top 3D cartoon form.

Since highly trained dogs play a central role in the film, all of them are incredibly detailed and their characters are fully developed. The evil leader, Alpha, is a Doberman Pinscher whose collar has a bit of a malfunction that makes for some great interactions with the other dogs. Beta is a Rottweiler who is second in command. Gamma is a Bulldog who is considerably further down on the chain of command.

Doug (Sorry, "Dug") doesn't fit in very well, because he's not the sharpest of dogs and he's much more caring than the others. Even when he's somewhat stupidly going along with a fairly evil task that he's been trained to do, he's so good natured, that he messes it up.

"Doug is lovable, he's loyal, and he's not the brightest dog," says Pete Docter, Up's Writer/Director.

A good chunk of the laughs in Up comes from Doug's interaction (through his talking dog collar) with everyone around him. The video above is on the creative process that the cool folks at Pixar went through in bringing Dug to life, and the hilarity that giving him a talking dog collar brought to the production. Since the collar isn't really allowing Dug to talk, but just verbalizing his doggie thoughts, it speaks every single one of a typical Golden Retreiver's thoughts as he goes through the day.

"We tried to stay true to what would really happen if you put a talking dog collar on a dog," relates Pixar Producer John Rivera.

The results are just sublime. Up is in theaters starting today, and I plan on seeing it approximately 132 times, and only partially because Golden Retreivers are one of my favorite dog breeds.