Animation

DVDs I bought or received in the month of November

• Hannibal (R0 Germany, Blu-ray)
• Shrooms (R0 UK, Blu-ray) [gift]
• The Stendhal Syndrome (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Wall-E (RB UK, Blu-ray) [review copy]

How’s that for self-restraint? I said last month that I’d have to cut down, and by golly, I only went and did it.

Wall-E Blu-ray impressions

On Tuesday, my brother received his copy of the US Blu-ray release of Wall-E (the 2-disc edition, naturally, not the pointless 3-disc version with a useless Digital Copy to inflate the price tag). Almost immediately, he had to leave for London to receive Imaging Science Foundation (ISF) training, so I took the opportunity to nab the disc from his shelf and give it a quick run-through.

I should point out that, until I’ve watched the film on the big screen, which we should hopefully be doing over the weekend, I won’t be assigning the transfer an overall rating, but I was very impressed by what I saw and would, at this early stage, call myself 99% satisfied. As with the BD of Pixar’s Ratatouille before it, the look of Wall-E is smooth rather than pin sharp. I take this to be an intentional cinematographic choice; certainly, it allows the film to avoid the sterile look that plagues most CGI films. As such, while it doesn’t have the razor sharp look of, say, Open Season, it’s by far the more aesthetically pleasing of the two. There is, however, one mild caveat: compression. Don’t get me wrong, it’s almost completely flawless, but as soon as I saw the surprisingly low bit rate of 21.1 GB (on the disc, a total of 28.6 out of a possible total of 50 GB is occupied by data), I did begin to be rather concerned. This is by no means a compression nightmare, but eagle-eyed viewers may be able to spot some occasional artefacts affecting a handful of scenes combining fast motion with high amounts of detail. Take a look at Example 12 for an idea of what to (occasionally) expect.

Overall, it’s a highly impressive transfer, but Ratatouille remains Disney’s best-looking BD. I just hope the film is still as magical as I remember it being.

Wall-E
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 21.1 GB)

A rumble in the jungle

Eidos Interactive have released a demo for the PC version of Tomb Raider: Underworld, the latest instalment in the long-running adventure franchise, due out tomorrow in North America and on November 21st throughout Europe. (Actually, the demo has been available since October 31st, but I only discovered it today.)

Anyway, the demo contains what I suspect is the first level of the full game, and, based on the 20-25 minutes it took me to complete it, Eidos have another winner on their hands, once against proving that they made the right decision in yanking development duties away from Core Design and handing them over to Crystal Dynamics. The most impressive feat, in my eyes, is that for once all the promised improvements seem to have been delivered. In the past, when Core had the development rights, the creative team would continually crow about how whichever instalment was currently in development would be “back to the drawing board”, “redone from scratch” and so on, but in the end they’d simply serve up last year’s game with a few half-hearted tweaks implemented, much like a reheated carry-out and considerably less tasty. With Tomb Raider: Legend, however, Crystal Dynamics started from scratch, putting together a compelling reboot of the series that succeeded in washing away the stench of the later Core years. With Tomb Raider: Anniversary, they came through again, building on the solid foundation of the original 1996 Tomb Raider to provide an updated, slicker and more challenging iteration of the game. Judging by the Underworld demo, this successful streak looks set to continue.

The big focus this time round appears to be on two things: realism and player choice. While I tend to feel that making games as hyper-realistic as possible is overrated and an exercise in futility, I can’t deny that it’s appropriate to the Tomb Raider series, which has always been about the player infiltrating intricately detailed environments and relying on his or her powers of observation to solve complex puzzles. In that respect, a more realistic world helps make the experience more immersive, and I have to say that the new Lara Croft, motion captured from Olympic gymnast Heidi Moneymaker, is nothing like as clunky as I initially feared. Motion capture, particularly in computer games, where responsive controls and accurate movement are paramount, often strikes me as bland and detrimental to playability, but I have no complaints here. Ultimately, I suspect I’ll always prefer the more stylised nature of the key-frame animation used on the likes of the Guild Wars and Warcraft franchises (which I know have next to nothing in common, gameplay-wise, with Tomb Raider, but still…), but I can appreciate a nicely-done exercise in realism when I see one. Oh, and she’s still voiced by the delectable Keeley Hawes.

The other big thing, player choice, is realised in the fact that the game world is now a lot more open-ended, meaning that there is often more than one route to the end of a level, or more than one way to complete a given puzzle. This goes hand in hand with the increased degree of realism, because the more organic visuals mean that it’s no longer quite so obvious that you have to jump from block A to block B in order to progress. The developers seem to want to hammer this home right from the word go, starting you aboard a yacht in the middle of the water and leaving the you to decide in which direction to head. (Actually, at this early stage it’s fairly obvious that you need to head for the nearest stretch of dry land, but it’s a world away from plonking you at one end of a corridor and asking you to run to the other end of it.) Incidentally, I’m extremely impressed that, despite the massive increase in the quality of the graphics over Legend (which now looks decidedly quaint), the performance actually appears to have improved rather than worsened.

It’s hard to gauge the overall quality of the game based on this brief demo, but what I’ve seen has certainly whet my appetite for more. This is definitely a title I’ll be adding to my list for Father Christmas. Oh, and as a plus, it doesn’t appear to have been infected with any objectionable DRM schemes: from what I can gather, it does use SecuROM, but, like Legend and Anniversary before it, only to check that an original disc rather than a copy is in the drive. In other words, no limited installations or mandatory online activations farrago. I don’t know about you, but personally I can live with having to put the disc in the drive when I play the game.

Christmas comes early (long post)

Apologies for the posting constipation recently. I’m currently in crunch mode on the latest submission for my PhD, which is due in early next week and will consist of an introduction to my thesis, covering its origins, key aims and my working definition of what exactly a giallo is. (One of the downsides to choosing such an obscure branch of the movie tree for your research is that, at the start of every article you write or presentation you give, you have to squander precious words or minutes explaining what the hell you’re talking about.) Still, despite this being a pretty intensive period, I’m enjoying this phase a lot more than the last one (the literature review), which I felt dragged on for too long without me having a clear sense of direction.

Anyway, I just thought I’d check in to post that I decided to finally replace my PC’s ageing Creative Inspire 5.1 Digital 5700 speakers with a spruce new Logitech Z-5500 Digital package as an early Christmas present. I did this for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I wanted better audio than I was currently getting, and, while I knew I could never compete with my brother’s setup, at least not without having access to vastly more money and space than I currently have, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to go for the best setup I could get my hands on within my current means. Various reviews swung me towards the Z-5500, which, unlike most of the current generation of PC speakers, has the added bonus of including its own internal Dolby Digital and DTS decoders, should I ever want to send it encoded signals in either of these two formats.

[Continue reading "Christmas comes early (long post)"...]

DVDs I bought or received in the month of October

• Carrie (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Chicken Run (R0 France, Blu-ray)
• Disturbia (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• The Fourth Protocol (R2 UK, DVD)
• The Frighteners (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• How the West Was Won (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• In the Folds of the Flesh (R0 USA, DVD)
• L.A. Confidental (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Léon: The Professional (RB Germany, Blu-ray)
• Lewis: Series Two (R2 UK, DVD)
• A Mighty Heart (R0 UK, HD DVD)
• Monster (R0 Germany, Blu-ray)
• The Omen Collection (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Sleeping Beauty (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Trial & Retribution: The Third Collection (R2 UK, DVD)

Oh god… that sound is my bank balance groaning. It’s been a long, long time since I bought this many titles in a single month - chalk it up to timing more than anything. I shall have to take care to ration myself strictly for the next little while.

Chicken Run Blu-ray impressions

Who knew that Aardman Animation’s Chicken Run had been released on Blu-ray? Not me, at least until the other day, when I accidentally stumbled across it on Amazon’s French web site. Taking a gamble, I placed an order for it. It arrived on Tuesday, and I’m happy to report that not only is it region-free (and without the hindrance of forced subtitles), it’s also a rather nice-looking disc. It doesn’t look amazing, but it’s a hell of a lot closer to how I would have liked The Nightmare Before Christmas to look than the version Disney ultimately ended up putting out. While some grain reduction have been performed, it’s of the temporal rather than spatial variety, meaning that it hasn’t led to the image being eroded or rendered waxy or watercolour-like. Unfortunately, some artefacts are present (look what happens to the axe in Example 13, below), but it’s a far more agreeable looking image overall. (The comparisons are valid, I think, given that both use stop motion animation, and both were shot on 35mm film, unlike, say, the digital Corpse Bride.)

Chicken Run
(Pathé/Studio Canal, France, VC-1, 15.8 GB)

Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray impressions (long post)

On Tuesday, I received my copy of Sleeping Beauty, the first of Disney’s animated classics to make it to Blu-ray. A 2-disc set (plus an utterly pointless “bonus DVD” version glued to the front cover), this Platinum Edition was quite clearly an extremely cost- and labour-intensive undertaking, and you can read more about the process in a very interesting interview with Theo Gluck, Director of Library Restoration and Preservation for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, as well as an interview with the considerably less informed Sara Duran-Singer, Senior Vice-President of Post Production at Disney.

Of course, what I’m sure everyone wants to know is how the end product looks. I’ll make this simple right off the bat: if you want a general, non-critical response, go and read any of the multitude of reviews written on various web sites that give it ratings of 100% or 10/10 and call it the best thing since sliced bread. For a slightly more in-depth analysis, read on.

First of all, let’s be clear about one thing: this is not the Sleeping Beauty that was released in cinemas in 1959. What I mean by that is that it is subject to the same degree of clean-up and revisionism that Disney has applied to the home video releases of its more prestigious animated titles since the Masterpiece Edition DVD of Alice in Wonderland in 2004 (I’m discounting red-headed stepchildren like The Aristocats and The Fox and the Hound, which were subjected to considerably less rigorous treatment). In other words, any trace of film grain has been scrubbed away, the colours have been altered (quite substantially, in some instances), and it essentially now looks like a film that was made in 2008 rather than 1959. Oddly enough, when something similar was done to Patton for 20th Century Fox’s recent Blu-ray release of that title, cinephiles the world over were up in arms. When Disney does it to their animated films, however, there is a curious lack of uproar. Perhaps it’s because, as an animated film, certain narrow-minded individuals don’t believe it to be worthy of “serious” attention? I doubt that this is the case, however - a brief glance at any number of film-related forums will reveal dozens of people who clearly love the film dearly and are over the moon about this new Blu-ray release.

That’s absolutely fine. I’m glad that people are enjoying this new disc, and have absolutely no problem with that. My concern is with the technicians at Disney, whose house practice of scrubbing the grain from their films goes completely against what I’m looking for when I pop a disc into my player. If a film never had grain to start with, then fine - I’m not expecting something like Ratatouille or Beauty and the Beast, both created entirely in the digital domain, to be sourced from prints (although, sometimes, I do think it would be nice). In the case of a film from the 50s, though, seeing something that has been processed to the extent that it no longer looks like it ever touched film is more than a little off-putting.

That said, for what it is, Sleeping Beauty looks very good indeed. Excellent at times, in fact. There is an extremely impressive amount of detail in the backgrounds, for example in shots 4, 8 and 9 below. The encoding is, for the most part, extremely good (barring a few isolated instances of artefacting). The expanded 2.55:1 aspect ratio (versus the 2.35:1 ratio of previous releases), greatly improves the image composition and reveals all sorts of details at the sides of the frame that were clearly intended to be seen. Unfortunately, barring the overly clean look, you also have to contend with the tell-tale side effects of such heavy noise reduction, mostly in the form of mangled outlines: take a look at the spears in shot 2, or the owl’s eyes in shot 7. For a particularly destructive example, gawp at the mess that is shot 5 - by far the worst-looking few seconds on the disc and something that is, mercifully, the exception rather than the rule.

There is a final point that I would like to make: the issue of the colours. As with the Platinum Edition DVD of Peter Pan, there has been some amount of debate as to the colour timing of this release. A comparison with previous releases of the film (such as the one performed by Chuck Pennington at the Golden Age Cartoons Forum) reveals major differences, and often not for the better. Look at the various different versions of the shot of Aurora and the three fairies (the first one in Chuck’s comparison): the 2008 DVD release, which is derived from the same master as the Blu-ray version, looks noticeably “off”, particularly in terms of Fauna (the green fairy)’s outfit. Put simply, the colours clash and don’t “read” properly. Contrast this with the previous releases, all of which look more natural. For an even more egregious example, take a look at shot 5, previously discussed above: there is far too much similarity in the different shades of blue in Merryweather’s costume for the image to read properly as a whole. Compare this with the 2003 DVD release, where there was proper delineation between the different shades of blue, making the image much easier to look at rather than a mish-mash of clashing hues.

Now, Disney staff have been quick to point out in interviews that the original animation cels and backgrounds were used as a reference during the colour timing. However, I rather fear that they have missed the point here: essentially, they are neglecting the fact that the artists specifically chose colours with an eye towards how they would ultimately look when printed to film, which is obviously not going to be the same as how they look on paper or an animation cel. Warner did exactly the same with their Looney Tunes DVDs, with equally problematic results. A couple of comments on the subject can be read at Cartoon Brew. Says Eric, in the context of the Looney Tunes DVDs:

Maurice Noble [stylist and co-director on many of the Looney Tunes cartoons] once explained to me how he would over saturate the colors in a character or a scene to compensate for the inferiority of the film. Once on film, the color would be toned down to about what he intended. This is where you could run into a problem during restoration.

This is followed by a post by Jeff Kurtti, a film historian and authority on all things Disney. What he says is particularly pertinent to Disney’s art practices:

The true reference point for restoration is a primary color film positive source, not the original animation art.

Studios such as Disney did extensive color testing on cel set-ups to determine how paints, backgrounds, and exposures would affect the final film image, many of the animation art colors are purposely distorted in order to “read” correctly on film. (There is a selection of camera tests like this on the “Snow White” laser disc and Platinum DVD.)

Alice (of Wonderland fame) on cels, for instance, has decidedly green blond hair, in order to “read” on film as golden yellow.

(Emphasis mine.)

Ultimately, my overall impression of this transfer is that, flaws aside, it is a very good one. It could have been a great one. However, thanks to Disney’s revisionism practices, it falls shy of perfection, meaning that, as good as it is, there are a number of moments that will take observant viewers out of the film itself, which I’m sure we will all agree is never a good thing. Overall, I’d say that the massive improvement in detail makes this a more than worthwhile upgrade over the previous standard definition releases, but it’s frustrating thanks to the number of things that have gone wrong along the way. Take a look at the captures below and judge for yourselves.

Sleeping Beauty
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 17 GB)

NB: thanks to Lyris for providing some of the screen captures.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of September

• Blow (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• La Femme Publique (R0 USA, DVD) [sample copy]
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Kill Bill Volume 1 (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Kill Bill Volume 2 (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Mean Girls (R2 UK, DVD) [gift]
• Mother of Tears (RB France, Blu-ray)
• Tekkonkinkreet (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (RA USA, Blu-ray)

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days. I’ve been really busy with PhD work. Hopefully things will quieten down a bit by the middle of next week.

Site update

It occurred to me today that, with all the Ren & Stimpy screen captures I’d been posting lately, my main news page had been getting pretty cluttered. More crucially, I’d imagine it was starting to take a long, long time to load all these images for people with slower connections. With that in mind, I’ve decided to make use of Movable Type’s “MTEntryMore” tag for posts with excessive numbers of images. Basically, what this means is that, in order to view the full post, you’ll have to follow the link to the individual entry page (e.g. this one for Ren Needs Help and Ren Seeks Help): on the index, category and monthly archive pages, you’ll just see the first few paragraphs of text followed by a clickable link to the individual entry. I appreciate that this might be a bit of a pain for visitors with faster connections, but it should lighten the load for those whose Internet connections aren’t up to the task of quickly crunching through over 400 jpegs.

I’ve edited all the Ren & Stimpy posts to take this new feature into account, and will be applying it to any future posts that I feel warrant it.

[Continue reading "Site update"...]

If at first you don’t succeed

During the first couple of seasons of Ren & Stimpy, a number of episode ideas were either rejected by Nickelodeon’s story editors or simply put to one side as they didn’t work and/or their wasn’t enough time to do them. Towards the end of the Games run, however, the extremely punishing schedule of the final season necessitated a lot of what are best termed “cheater” cartoons (i.e. cartoons that could be churned out fast to meet the schedule). During the second season, Bob Camp directed a handful of “cheaters”, freeing up John Kricfalusi to direct the more ambitious ones. These generally placed Ren and Stimpy in generic situations - e.g. in the army, at a wrestling match, at the zoo - and were less concerned which characterisation than simply stringing together some funny gags to make an entertaining 11-minute short. By 1994/1995, however, it had become a case of simply digging up a story - any story - and turning it into an episode in order to fulfil the order for which the crew had been contracted. As a result, they ended up using a number of storylines that Nickelodeon had originally rejected.

One of these was Ren Needs Help, a John K./Richard Pursel concept in which Ren, after doing something unspeakably horrible to Stimpy, realises just how insane he is and decides to get psychiatric help. The Games interpretation, which credits Jim Gomez and Bob Camp as the writers, follows the basic premise of Ren seeing a therapist, but omits Ren’s feeling of guilt, instead portraying him as being forcibly institutionalised, in what seems to be a botched take-off of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The screen captures below are taken from the final scene of Ren Needs Help, in which Ren finally goes completely insane and ends up being lobotomised. There’s a gag at the end about him being dressed up to look like the president and sent to the moon to make a speech, which I’m assuming is some sort of in-joke that didn’t come across in the finished cartoon. (A lot of the Games episodes are like that.)

[Continue reading "If at first you don’t succeed"...]

I know kung fu, doop-dee-doo!

My copy of the Blu-ray release of Kill Bill Volume 1 arrived yesterday while I was at work. We watched it in the evening to put my brother’s beefy new sound system through its paces: finally, uncompressed PCM 5.1 support aboard the HMS Whimsy! It was my first time watching the film in a while, and I have to admit that, although I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it, it went ever so slightly down in my estimation. While more or less everything in the House of Blue Leaves and beyond is top quality entertainment, I must confess to finding quite a lot of the stuff along the way plodding and overly focused on banal dialogue. In that regard, it has something in common with Quentin Tarantino’s most recent film, Death Proof, which had a great final half-hour but meandered along for its first 80 minutes obsessing over trite conversations that I’m sure sounded very cool and absolutely fascinating to Tarantino but left me clock-watching. Kill Bill is a significantly better film overall, but it definitely suffers from similar flaws.

Seeing the US cut of the film after being used to the Japanese cut for so long was a bit of a shock to the system. In particular, I felt that the switch to black and white during the showdown with the Crazy 88 didn’t really work, and ended up making it overly difficult to see what was going on (which, from a censorial standpoint, was presumably the aim all along). I also missed all the little moments of blood-letting that had been snipped away here and there: I’m not what you’d call a gore-hound, in the sense that generally speaking a movie has to be more than deliriously violent to keep me entertained, but remembering what was present in the Japanese really made me miss it. I hope Universal gets round to releasing this film in HD in Japan - or, better yet, the Weinstein Company finally puts out The Whole Bloody Affair, which they and Tarantino have been promising for god knows how long.

Image quality-wise, Volume 1, as I expected, looks more or less exactly like Volume 2 - which is to say very good, but sadly not perfect. Once again, temporal noise reduction is evident throughout, reducing the grain and giving the image a somewhat digital look. I also spotted a handful of instances of the NR causing artefacts, mostly in the anime sequence, where some of the black outlines of the animation ended up being ghosted from one frame to the next. Most of it is fairly minor, but it does baffle me that this was done in the first place. After all, the animation was created entirely in the digital domain, with the grain that is present in the final composite having been added artificially. Since the technical crew had complete control over the grain in this segment to begin with, why add it and then reduce it? Unless, that is, the NR was added specifically for the Blu-ray release (or the master from which it was derived) after all rather than at the DI stage. Ah well, at least detail is, for the most part spot on, and, NR aside, there is no other obvious digital interference, barring a smattering of what looks to me like edge enhancement in certain shots in the snow garden outside the House of Blue Leaves.

Oh, and can I just say that the PCM 5.1 track kicks major derriere? I haven’t compared the compressed Dolby Digital 5.1 track yet, so I’ve no idea how big a difference the uncompressed PCM format makes, but it certainly gave me a new appreciation of the importance of having a decent home audio system.

Kill Bill Volume 1
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 29.3 GB)

Non-consensual happiness and triple buttock syndrome

Stimpy’s Invention was the final episode of the first season of Ren & Stimpy in 1991. Apparently, John Kricfalusi had to beg the Nickelodeon executives to let him make it (they hated the premise), and then held it back for an insane amount of time, forcing his artists redraw everything multiple times in order to make sure it was perfect. This resulted in what I believe is a strong contender for the single greatest piece of animation ever created for television. It’s a work of demented genius, with the most outlandish posing you’ll ever see in a cartoon and one of the most moronically catchy musical numbers ever written, “Happy Happy Joy Joy” (even if you’ve never seen an episode of Ren & Stimpy, you’ve probably heard this catchphrase in some context).

It also features a deceptively simple but surprisingly edgy story. Basically, Stimpy is upset by the fact that Ren is always angry and decides to resolve the situation by creating a helmet for Ren to wear that will force him to be happy. It works a treat, but at the expense of Ren’s free weill. Stinky Whizzleteats (named after the singer of the episode’s “Happy Happy Joy Joy” song) wrote a magnificent post about this episode on SpumBoard that I think describes the episode so perfectly that, rather trying to match it with my own words, I’ve simply quoted:

Stimpy’s Invention is not only my favorite R&S episode, but it might just be the greatest animated cartoon ever made. What this episode does, much to the contrary of the discussion above is something that only the rarest of popular artworks have achieved it breaks down the barrier between writing and images. Throuhgout the entire episode, dialogue, visuals and music trade roles, never merely explaining one another. “Don’t move - I’ll go get the stay-put hat and raincoat!” That’s a visual idea, in words. Stimpy explains how his Happy Helmet works, but it’s unintended consequences are purely visual. “I told you I’d shoot, but you didn’t believe me!” Stinky Whizzleteats (the character, not me) accidentally lets slip a past event which is probably related in someway to his need to be incessantly happy and inforce the same in others. He probably had his mind controlled, and so did every single one of us in the audience. At the exact moment that we hear this, Ren is preparing to remove the helmet by force. the visual aid illiustrates not how the shooting incident happened, but why Ren ought to disassociate himself from the process of dehumanization with which Stinky’s song is complicit. It’s a complex approach to matching words with imagery, but it doesn’t break from conventional storytelling.

John K. has said that this episode “doesn’t have an ending.” I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about - it has the most compelling ending of any cartoon ever made. Ren is angry again, meaning that he is no longer being forced to be happy. Therefore, he is happy? All of us get angry sometimes, but aren’t we lucky to live in a society where that’s allowed? where we can voice our dissatisfaction with authority and mobilize to change it? But wait - let’s not forget the most important part: Stimpy never understood Ren’s problem. His simple inability to get it and leave Ren alone drove him to create the happy helmet. The helmet was evil, but Stimpy made it out of the goodness of his heart. But wait - isn’t Stimpy just a little bit sadistic? Maybe he is, Look how much he enjoys manipulating Ren! Maybe we all are….

This has been called a complex cartoon before. Those of us capable of such an understatement must shave their moustaches with a guillotine.

Apologies to Stinky for pilfering his post, but if he would rather I took it down, I will.

Anyway, here are a selection of shots from the crucial scene in which Stimpy installs the Happy Helmet and forcibly alters Ren’s personality. I challenge you to find poses this insane anywhere else.

[Continue reading "Non-consensual happiness and triple buttock syndrome"...]

The knack to making disgusting things look appealing

Here’s another comparison between John K. and post-John K. Ren & Stimpy. The differences this time are slightly less pronounced than in the previous one, partly because neither cartoon is reaching for the psychotic extremes found in Sven Höek and Hermit Ren and therefore the character poses are less outlandish. Still, although more subtle, I think it’s clear that a definite shift has taken place. Both cartoons illustrate a similar scenario - Ren’s growing irritation at the sounds of Stimpy’s bedtime grooming habits - but one is executed with considerable flair and appeal, whereas the other seems to revel in being as gross as possible simply for the sake of grossness. A lot of people think Ren & Stimpy was just about being as disgusting as possible, but in my opinion part of what made the earlier episodes so successful was that they were able to combine the revoltingness of bodily functions and, at times, pain, with a certain type of appeal unique to cartoons. The first cartoon has this in abundance. The second… well, I’ll let you see for yourselves.

Here’s 1992’s Ren’s Toothache, directed by John Kricfalusi:

[Continue reading "The knack to making disgusting things look appealing"...]

The devolution of Ren & Stimpy

The Ren & Stimpy Show is one of my favourite television series of all time, if not my absolute favourite (if it’s not, though, I can’t think of anything else I would put in its place). For me, no animated series produced for television was ever as good or better than Ren & Stimpy at its best. For a brief period in the early 90s, it seemed that the classical principles of animation - funny drawings, beautiful paintings, cartoonists rather than scriptwriters in the driving seat, etc. - were going to make a comeback thanks to this show, and I suppose in a way they did for a short while, with the likes of Dexter’s Laboratory and Cow & Chicken on Cartoon Network, and to some extent Rocko’s Modern Life and SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon.

The funny thing, though, is that, although Ren & Stimpy ran from 1991 to 1995, the Ren & Stimpy that I love only lasted for a couple of years. As is now fairly commonly known, control of the show was unceremoniously yanked from the hands of its creator, John Kricfalusi, after less than two years. The reasons for this have been debated and called into question on multiple occasions, and I won’t go into them here. Suffice it to say, though, the quality of the series steadily plummeted without the guiding influence of its creator, with the result that, in the words of Dan Persons:

In two years, Nick[elodeon] has succeeded in taking a show that many expected to become heir to the Looney Tunes mantle, and turned it into a repetitive mess.

Below is a series of screen captures from the climactic scene of Sven Höek, one of the best episodes of Ren & Stimpy ever created and one of the last that Kricfalusi had full control over. (Some post production work was created after he was shown the door, but I’d estimate that a good 95% of the finished piece was supervised by him.) While it’s hard to get a feel of the genius timing, animation, voice acting and dialogue just from these pictures, hopefully they convey the sheer intensity and artistic skill that went into the staging and posing of this great cartoon.

[Continue reading "The devolution of Ren & Stimpy"...]

The spirits without

I picked up a couple of Blu-ray discs yesterday in a sale at Zammo that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have bought were it not for the fact that they were on sale in a “2 for £20” deal. (Anyway, I was in a buoyant mood because I’d just received a large sum of money that had been incorrectly taken off me in taxes over the past twelve months of so, and felt like treating myself.)

One was Tekkonkinkreet, which caught my eye a while ago because it’s one of those rare anime productions that I actually think has a semi-interesting visual style. The other, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, is a film that I’m not a massive fan of - in fact, the only reason I tolerate its soulless, stilted, so-called “realistic” visual style is the knowledge that the various imitators it spawned (e.g. Robert Zemeckis’ butt-ugly The Polar Express and Beowulf) are a whole lot worse. Still, I kept hearing about how good the BD transfer supposedly was, so eventually I got fed up waiting for it to become available for rental and decided to plonk down the cash for it.

Anyway, I took a look at it tonight, and yes, it’s a very good transfer. Not perfect, but still really impressive. My purchase of the standard definition DVD release, back in 2001, actually marked something of a special event for me because it was the point at which I started becoming aware just how many DVD reviewers were full of the proverbial. Put simply, the glowing 10/10, A++ and 100% ratings for image quality didn’t match my own impression of it being overly filtered and riddled with compression artefacts. But I digress. The Blu-ray release is about as far as you can get from the DVD as you can get, although a small amount of filtering has been applied and is present throughout: check the light ringing around the text in the final capture below. It’s fairly minor, but it means that the disc does just fall shy of perfection. I wonder why they thought it was necessary to do this.

Oh, and, as a side note, I do like that, despite the film never having touched celluloid, someone was thoughtful enough to actually try to make it look like film by adding a sheen of grain to it. The illusion is actually quite effective and goes some way towards making the motion captured CGI visuals look slightly less clunky and fake than they otherwise would have.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
(Sony Pictures, UK, AVC, 25.2 GB)

Additional Nightmare notes

My post from a few days ago on the new Blu-ray release of The Nightmare Before Christmas attracted some negative attention from a small number of people, including a fellow Blu-ray reviewer who accused me of “irresponsible sensationalism designed to stir up controversy”. I’d like to take the opportunity to address some of the issues relating to both the disc itself and my post.

First of all, the reviewer in question feels that my post “blows any small issues with the disc way out of proportion” and “makes almost no mention at all that the disc actually looks pretty damn terrific”. To some extent, I agree in principle with the latter point. The disc certainly does not look “pretty damn terrific” (then again, on certain occasions I have found this reviewer’s impressions to be so far off the mark as to be laughable), but it does look pretty good for the most part, with a high level of detail in most scenes, solid compression and rich, deep colours. Admittedly, I neglected to stress these positives in my review, but here’s the thing: I expect high detail, a lack of compression artefacts and an accurate colour palette in my HD transfers. So sue me, I’m an optimist and like to think, when I pop in a shiny new disc, that I’ll get gold. Despite the number of times the studios have let their customers down, I still hope for the best.

As a result, when I notice flaws, I have a tendency to make them the focal point of my posts and reviews. That, to me, is not unreasonable. Of course it’s important to accentuate the positive so that the studios can see that we appreciate a job well done, but it’s even more important to call them on the boners they pull so they can take steps to ensure that the same things don’t happen again. If you look through the various Blu-ray and HD DVD image quality reviews I’ve written on this site, I think you’ll find that, if a disc looks particularly good, I’ll be sure to shout it from the rooftops. I take the opportunity to point out problematic discs, but equally well, if a disc is flawless (or nearly flawless), I have a feeling that I’ll be among the most vocal in my praise of it.

I can appreciate the need for balance in reviews, so let me take the opportunity to fill in the gaps in my previous post by summarising the situation.

The Nightmare Before Christmas on Blu-ray is:

- Colourful
- Well encoded
- Detailed in around 90% of shots
- Still the best film Tim Burton attached his name to
- When all said and done, the best representation of the film on optical disc

It is not:

- Flawless
- An accurate representation of its source materials
- Film-like
- Free of DVNR artefacts

Overall, it works out at around a high 7/10 in my book. No, it’s not a “pretty damn terrific” transfer, but it’s not exactly shameful either.

Christmas comes early

My brother received Disney’s recent Blu-ray release of Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas today. This is a film that Disney initially got cold feet over releasing and so put it out under the Touchstone Pictures banner instead, only to reclaim it years later (quite probably after they realised what a money-maker it was).

Anyway, the disc has been the recipient of some extremely positive reviews. I’m sorry to report, however, that it is yet another DVNR victim. That’s not to say that it’s an awful transfer by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s extremely inconsistent. Some shots are Dark City bad, but others are as good as, say, Corpse Bride, with most shots lying somewhere in between the two. Grain-sucking has been applied, but not consistently, so some shots retain their original grain, but the majority don’t. For the most part, the grain reduction is not massively destructive, but some shots look extremely waxy, with the optical effects shots (basically everything with Zero, fire, glowing lights, etc.) looking particularly bad. Overall this could have been a lot worse, but don’t believe the people who are claiming that this film is unmolested.

Overall, it’s a definite upgrade over the DVD releases (and that includes the very good anamorphic 1.66:1 release from Scandinavia, which trounced every other version), but, as is often the case, it’s frustrating to think how much better it could have been. The massive irony is that, had this been a modern film made within the last couple of years, the technicians would probably have assumed that it didn’t need any sort of digital “restoration” applied to it and, as a result, it would therefore have ended up looking far grainier.

Oh, and, in a further instance of tampering, the Touchstone Pictures logo at the start of the film has been replaced with a Walt Disney one. I’m not happy about that. It may not sound like the end of the world, but it’s yet another example of the creeping revisionism that studios feel they can get away with inflicting on their movies. From there, it’s a slippery slope towards modifications of the George Lucas variety.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 21.7 GB)

Update, September 2nd, 2008 10:19 AM: While watching the film last night, we both spotted a number of instances of the DVNR eroding picture elements such as characters’ limbs. A comparison with the Scandinavian DVD revealed that this problem is new to the Blu-ray release (and probably also the concurrent standard definition re-release). An example can be seen at Lyris Lite. At least four instances were spotted in the course of a single play-through.

Buffy the Cartoon Slayer

At some point prior to the demise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an animated spin-off was proposed. It ultimately never came to pass, despite some aggressive lobbying by Joss Whedon and his colleagues, and despite a number of pieces of concept art that were released generating some degree of interest. Recently, however, a promo video was released (or leaked), giving fans a chance to see what the show that never was would have looked like. Some generous soul uploaded it to YouTube for your viewing consumption.

To be honest, my overriding reaction is that the show’s failure to materialise is no big loss. Based on this three and a half minute clip, it suffers from exactly the same problems as the Season 8 comics, namely flat characterisation and what I like to call “ice cream on the hamburgers” syndrome: essentially, a tendency to throw in everything but the kitchen sink simply because it’s possible. The “real” Buffy series made the most of its limited budget and generally found creative ways around monetary issues (the occasional clumsy CGI dragon notwithstanding). Here, the philosophy seems to have been that, because the medium is animation rather than live action, there’s no limit to what you can do.

This is a myth propagated by scriptwriters and executives who have no understanding of animation. Doing a visually audacious set-piece in animation is no different from doing one in live action, in that it takes longer and requires more work. Unfortunately, scriptwriters are rarely particularly good at thinking visually, generally speaking because it’s not in their job descriptor and the artist/writer segregation of the post-60s animation industry means that they are completely cut off from the visual side of production. It takes less than five seconds for a budding writer to type the words “a huge dragon flies through the entire city and has an epic fight with Buffy”. Now imagine the poor guy who has to draw it. It’s therefore no surprise that such scenes often have a lacklustre quality to them: they can’t be much fun to do, and as a result the animator ends up merely going through the motions and producing a piece of technically complex but ultimately lifeless animation.

The whole of the animated Buffy promo feels lifeless. It also feels rather pointless. What, after all, is this achieving that wasn’t already being achieved, more successfully, in its live action variant (barring the obvious increase in scope and scale mentioned above)? Okay, you’ve got Alyson Hannigan, Anthony Head et al voicing the characters they played in the live action show (Sarah Michelle Gellar didn’t want to participate and as a result was voiced by a soundalike, but everyone else appears to have been on board), but again this doesn’t achieve much, because none of the actors seem particularly comfortable in their roles. I’ve said it many times, but it’s worth repeating: to provide voice-overs for animation requires a completely different set of skills than to act on screen or on the stage. For one thing, you’re limited to your voice, and, let’s be honest, there aren’t many actors who are famed for their voices above all else. Put simply, a good actor doesn’t necessarily equate to a good voice actor. (Of course, it works in reverse too. Would you automatically assume Jim Cummings or Cam Clarke would be able to cut it in the live action world?)

So, ultimately, what you have is a curiosity piece that doesn’t serve much purpose other than to provide a brief thrill at the sight of something which looks vaguely like Sarah Michelle Gellar (and Alyson Hannigan, and…) moving around in animated form. Not exactly the strongest basis upon which to build a series. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked or found its audience, but it ultimately looks fairly limp and generic, and I’m not convinced Joss Whedon’s style of writing translates effectively into the animated world (just as I’m not convinced it translates effectively into comics).

DVDs I bought or received in the month of July

• All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• Dark City (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Gangs of New York (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Persepolis (RA USA, Blu-ray)
• Teeth (R1 USA, DVD)
   

Soon on this screen

It’s time for another rundown of the upcoming Blu-ray releases that I intend to pick up (finances permitting, of course). The second half of the year sees quite a few impressive titles debuting in high definition.

July 29th, 2008:
- Dark City (New Line) (ORDERED)
- Doomsday (Universal) (ORDERED)

August 26th, 2008:
- The Nightmare Before Christmas (Buena Vista)

September 9th, 2008:
- The Omen: The Collection (20th Century Fox)

September 23rd, 2008:
- The Godfather Collection (Paramount)
- LA Confidential (Warner)

September 30th, 2008:
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Dark Sky)

October 7th, 2008:
- Carrie (MGM)
- Sleeping Beauty (Buena Vista)