Best Animation: Yes Man Film 2009

Yes Man is a 2008 American comedy film directed by Peyton Reed and starring Jim Carrey. The film is based on the true story and 2005 book The Yes Man by British humourist Danny Wallace (who has a brief cameo in the film). Production began in Los Angeles, CA in October 2007.

Carl Allen (Jim Carrey) is a divorced middle-aged man in Los Angeles who spends his days working as a junior loan approval officer in a bank, supervised by his immature and childish manager Norman (Rhys Darby). Routinely declining social engagements so as to avoid meeting his ex-wife Stephanie (Molly Sims) with her new boyfriend, he has grown used to spending his evenings watching DVDs alone in his apartment while ignoring his friends' phone calls. But after he lets down his best friend Pete by forgetting about his engagement party, his friend Nick (John Michael Higgins) persuades him that he needs to start living again. Nick takes Carl to a motivational seminar called "Yes!" where Carl is publicly accosted by inspirational guru Terrence Bundley (Terence Stamp). Browbeaten into making a "covenant" with himself, Carl promises to stop being a "No Man" and to answer "Yes!" to every opportunity, request, or invitation that presents itself thereafter.

After the seminar, Carl is accosted by a homeless man who asks for a ride to Elysian Park. Although Carl's instinct is to say "no," Nick intervenes, reminding Carl that the proper answer is "yes." During the drive, the homeless man asks to borrow Carl's cell phone (Carl again says "yes") and wears out the battery making calls. When they reach their destination, the man asks for the cash in Carl's wallet (which Carl reluctantly relinquishes). But then Carl discovers that his car has run out of fuel. With his phone battery dead, he hikes to a gas station several miles away, where he meets Allison (Zooey Deschanel). She takes pity on him and gives him a hair-raising scooter ride back to his car. Emboldened by her spontaneity and by a newfound sense of possibility, Carl impulsively kisses Allison, and believes that his life has changed for the better.

After this positive start, Carl continues saying "yes." After he wins a promotion at the bank for agreeing to work on a Saturday, he goes out to celebrate with his friends, gets uproariously drunk, impetuously kisses a girl, and becomes involved in a comic fistfight with her boyfriend (he luckily escapes injury). But when he agrees to erect some shelving for his elderly neighbor Tillie (Fionnula Flanagan), and she proposes to reward him sexually, Carl is horrified. He says "no," and attempts to leave her apartment—but he gets his shirt stuck in the door, falls down the stairs after freeing himself, and almost gets mauled by a guard dog. Terrified that he has broken the "Yes!" covenant, Carl returns to his neighbor's apartment, where he allows her to perform oral sex on him.

After this brush with his old "No Man" self, Carl now commits himself to saying "yes" to absolutely every opportunity that comes his way—he takes flying lessons, attends Korean language classes, learns to play the guitar, and even says "yes" when he receives spam from a Persian dating website. As before, saying "yes" works to Carl's advantage. When he says "yes" to a concert promoter whom he has previously ignored, he sees a band whose lead singer turns out to be Allison. Although the band is dreadful and the audience tiny, Carl is again charmed by Allison's spontaneity and idiosyncrasy. She invites him to the unconventional photography class that she teaches in the park in the mornings, which combines photography with jogging, and the two begin dating.

At work, Carl has been saying "yes" to every loan application that crosses his desk, but this seemingly reckless approach to lending wins him a promotion to executive after it opens new territory for the bank in the area of microcredit. His newfound talents prove fruitful when it comes to saving a man from committing suicide: As the man stands on a ledge outside a tall building, Carl picks up a guitar and plays Third Eye Blind's song "Jumper" to persuade the man to return inside.

As their relationship blossoms, Carl and Allison meet at the airport for a spontaneous weekend away. Having decided to take the first plane out of town, they end up in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they explore the Frank H. Woods Telephone Museum, attend a college football game, and go skeet shooting. As they shelter from the rain in a barn before their departure, Allison asks Carl to move in with her. He hesitates, but says "yes" anyway. But while checking in for the return flight, Carl is detained by FBI agents, who have profiled him as potential terrorist because he has taken flying lessons, studied Korean, approved a loan to start a fertilizer company, been married for six months three years previously, and bought plane tickets at the last minute.

Carl calls his best friend Pete, a lawyer, who travels to Nebraska to explain Carl's commitment to saying "yes" to everything. At this point, Allison finds out about Carl's motivational covenant, and begins to doubt whether his commitment to her was ever sincere. She also finds out about Carl's marriage and divorce, which he had not mentioned to her previously. Deciding that she can no longer trust a man who is obliged to say "yes" to everything, regardless of his true feelings, Allison leaves Carl at the airport. Carl repeatedly tries to contact her, but to no avail.

In a vain effort to speak with Allison, Carl attends another of her band's concerts, where she indirectly tells him to jump off a bridge—and so Carl signs up to do a bungee jump. While dangling from the bridge after the jump, he receives a phone call from the bank's vice president, saying that he must fire his old boss Norman. He tries to make things better, going through with the bridal shower he has agreed to organize for Pete's fiancée, and even setting Norman up with a Korean party planner whom he met when planning the shower.

While he is broken up with Allison, Carl gets a tearful phone call from his ex-wife Stephanie, whose boyfriend has walked out on her. Carl goes to Stephanie's apartment to comfort her—but she kisses him passionately and asks whether they can get back together. After Carl emphatically says "no," his luck takes a turn for the worse: The elevator in which he tries to leave Stephanie's building almost snaps free of its cable, a black cat crosses his path, and his car gets clamped and towed. He has a momentary hallucination in which the tow-truck operator metamorphoses into himself, and starts to chant "No Man, No Man, No Man."

In desperation, Carl decides to track down Terrence Bundley so that he can be released from the "Yes!" covenant. After lying in wait for Bundley in the backseat of the latter's convertible, Carl emerges after the car pulls off, but Bundley is so shocked that he loses control of the vehicle and crashes it. Carl awakes some hours later in the hospital, only for the guru to tell him that there really wasn't any covenant, and that he wasn't supposed to take saying "yes" so literally. The point of the "covenant" was only to open Carl's mind to other possibilities, not to take away his ability to say "no" when he needed to. Freed from this restraint, Carl borrows from a male nurse the Ducati motorcycle that he has lent the man the money to buy and rides to Allison's morning class, wearing only a hospital gown. He apologizes, admits that he does not want to move in with her just yet, but tells her that he genuinely loves and wants her—and has been with her not just because he is compelled to say "yes." The couple kiss passionately while the amateur photographers capture the moment.

At the end of the movie, Carl and Allison make a rather large donation of clothes to a local homeless shelter. Cutting to the scene of the "Yes!" seminar, Bundley is surprised when he walks on stage to several hundred naked audience members. It is implied that the participants have said "Yes!" to donating their clothes to charity.

In a scene during the credits Carl and Allison try on a new body skating outfit designed by a man he had previously denied a loan early in the film. They zip down a large hill at high speeds laughing all the way.

Cast