Up With Monsters

Disney Mathematics 101--

Today's Lesson:

Pixar + Blu-Ray = Entertainment Heaven.

My recent home theater upgrade began late last spring. It started very indirectly with the purchase of a Blu-Ray-compatible Playstation 3. It culminated mid-summer with the acquisition of 40" flat panel HD television and a Yamaha surround sound receiver. Even then, I was still generally reluctant to begin the $-intensive task of upgrading my rather extensive film library.

But then I watched the Blu-Ray edition of Cars and whatever reservations I possessed were quickly dispelled. Animation is indeed a marvel to behold in Blu-Ray format; Pixar animation on Blu-Ray is simply a jaw-dropping, visual overload of the highest order. I immediately purchased Ratatouille, Wall-E and A Bug's Life, the only other Pixar titles then available in Blu-Ray format.

Happily, this week marks the arrival of two more Pixar features in Blu-Ray editions. It is a Pete Doctor old-and-new combination as the general home entertainment release of Up is accompanied to market by the director's first feature, Monsters, Inc. in brand new Blu-Ray trappings.

"Blue" serves quite well as the buzzword for this new high-def version of Monsters, Inc. Sulley's blue fur is simply breathtaking to behold in all its 1080 dpi glory. In a roundtable feature exclusive to the Blu-Ray, the filmmakers spoke of the challenge of rendering Sulley in the Himilaya scene with winds blowing and snow mixing into the character's fur. Viewing that particular scene in high definition certainly demonstrates that challenge and showcases the skills and talent that successfully executed it.

While many of the set's bonus features have been recycled from the original DVD release, a number of new Blu-Ray exclusive features have been added. Notable among them is a 12-minute look at the new Monsters, Inc. Ride and Go Seek attraction at Tokyo Disneyland and aforementioned Filmmakers Roundtable, a 22-minute discussion featuring director Pete Doctor, producer Darla Anderson and co-directors David Silverman and Lee Unkrich. For the younger set, Roz's 100-Door Challenge Game has been added. And as Pete Doctor notes in a new Blu-Ray intro, much of the original DVD bonus material, especially production art, has been upgraded to higher resolutions to match the high-def format.

Doctor's second feature and Pixar's 10th consecutive box office blockbuster, Up is equally served well by the Blu-Ray format. In contrast to Monsters' bright and colorful fantasy-based designs, Up showcases towering cityscapes and sweeping landscapes rich in earth tones. Textures in particular seem to jump off the screen, whether it be the rocky ground of South America or just simply the clothing worn by Karl and Russell.

Bonus features also abound on the Up set. The theatrical short Partly Cloudy is included, as well as the brand new Dug's Special Mission, a hilarious, if somewhat slight new vignette starring one of the film's more popular characters. Numerous featurettes and documentaries fill out the set's two Blu-Ray discs, as does the interactive Global Guardian Badge Game for younger viewers.

The Blu-Ray editions of both Monsters, Inc. and Up include the standard DVD versions of the films as well as digital copies that can be transferred to PCs and digital devices.

But most important, beyond all the home theater-high definition bells and whistles, exist two wonderful and very emotionally satisfying films. Even on small conventional television screens in mono sound, neither would fail to entertain.

Another Pixar Triumph

There is little that I can say about Ratatouille that hasn’t been said already. From the most popular of media outlets to the multitude of Disney related blogs and online communities, praise for this latest endeavor from Pixar is very close to unanimous. And deservedly so.

It is a triumph of technique, design, story and character and a film that transcends the very genre that its makers have essentially been defining and redefining for the past fifteen years. While few in Hollywood would likely ever rank Ratatouille writer-director Brad Bird among such luminaries as Scorsese, Spielberg or Eastwood, he manages a filmmaking process that is ever much more complex and produces results that are equally as entertaining and captivating.

Let’s face it—Pixar does not settle for the conventional. And nothing can be more unconventional than the story of Remy, a country rat with a passion for food and cooking, who inadvertently finds himself at the center of Paris culinary culture. While there are countless reasons to cheer this film, Remy stands out distinctly. He is an amazing triumph of character animation. When sharing the screen with his fellow rats, his personality his brought to life through the excellent voice acting of Patton Oswalt. But it is the nuances of his silent interactions with his human counterpart Linguini that provide a performance that is a triumph of humor and heart. For Remy, a simple shrug of the shoulders or the slow blink of an eye conveys an essence of character that you will never find in a Shrek film or among a group of dancing penguins.

While Monday morning will bring a new round of box office tallies, of which Ratatouille will undoubtedly be a focal point, this film will never need validation rooted in financial accounting. Pundits and Wall Street analysts will potentially drone on and on again on the merits of the Disney-Pixar merger, rehashing suppositions that have long grown stale and hold little relevance. For Ratatouille revisits the same passion for filmmaking and levels of artistic achievement that Walt Disney himself brought to productions such as Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia over a half a century ago. To discuss such an achievement strictly in the context of short-term number crunching and marketing campaign challenges, demonstrates a short-sightedness barely worthy of debate. Sometimes it is the intangible investments that in the long run pay the highest dividends.

Wall-E

Wall-E is the right movie at the right time. It is at its core a sincere and simple love story devoid of sarcasm and cynicism, but framed within a cautionary fable that gently, though still pointedly, presents a post-apocalypse future brought about by environmental neglect and commercial over-consumption. It is a visually stunning combination of art and design that conveys an astounding emotional depth through not just its deftly animated central characters, but via landscapes and panoramas at times hauntingly surreal and and at other times dense in high tech polish.

The film's title character, a resilient and ever-curious robot appears to be the last of his kind left on a garbage-filled and long abandoned planet earth. With his only friend, an equally sturdy and resilient cockroach, he spends his days compacting and stacking trash cubes while also collecting objects and paraphernalia from what is our now bygone civilization. In doing so, he has developed an unexpected emotional dynamic that imbues in him a loneliness, inspired especially by the romantic musical vignettes he has discovered on a VHS copy of the film Hello Dolly.

Wall-E's world is rocked both literally and figuratively by the arrival of EVE, a sleek distinctly female robot sent by the space-exiled last vestiges of humanity living on a distant starship. EVE is seeking any sign of the reemergence of organic life; Wall-E in turn seeks companionship from EVE and an emotional-physical connection in the form of the hand-holding he has witnessed in the scenes from Hello Dolly. Their romance ultimately takes them into space where they confront the overweight and overstimulated remnants of the human race who live an idyllic, albeit mindless existence and have long ago lost the heartfelt connectivity that Wall-E so desperately yearns for.

The film's hallmark is most certainly its earthbound first act, almost entirely devoid of dialog yet dense in character-driven story and emotional resonance. Though his romance with EVE takes center stage, his friendship with the unnamed cockroach is equally rich in nuance and charm. Director/writer Andrew Stanton embraced a wholly unconventional approach with the material, but it paid huge dividends. So incredibly well-realized are Wall-E, EVE and the movie's other non-human denizens, you are never at a loss to understand what they are all about. It all represents a commitment to creative integrity that continues to set Pixar well above their closest competitors.

Equally entertaining, but in an altogether different way was Presto, the new Pixar animated short that preceded Wall-E. It is a beautiful and hilarious Tex Avery-inspired cartoon that is pure fun from beginning to end.