7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
This compilation includes such masterworks as the multi-award winners 'Sleeping Betty' and 'Madame Tutli-Putli'. Other selections range from the traditional to the experimental, featuring 'Drux Flux', 'The Spine', 'Spare Change', 'Rosa Rosa', 'Invasion of the Space Lobsters', 'Sainte Barbe', 'Land of the Heads' and much more, with 13 additional shorts exclusive to the Blu-ray Disc and unavailable anywhere else, including: 'At Home with Mrs. Hen', 'Nightmare at School', 'Cot Cot', 'Pimp My Boat', 'Ryan' (Winner, Canne Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Academy Award), 'Stationary', 'Terra', 'The True Story of Sawney Beane', 'Roots', 'The Danish Poet' (Winner, Academy Award), 'Uncle Bob�s Hospital Visit', 'The Real Place' and 'Peggie Baker Four Phrases'. �
Animation | 100% |
Short | 28% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1, 1.78:1
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
English, French
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Since 1941, the Film Board of Canada has sponsored and produced short films by some of the most influential artists in the world of animation, from the groundbreaking experiments of Norman McLaren, to Torill Kove’s The Danish Poet, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Animated Short Film. If you haven’t heard of the FBoC, don’t fret—characteristically for America’s neighbor to the north, they keep a low profile—but for 70 years they’ve been one of the foremost advocates for independent animators, churning out hundreds of shorts and garnering almost just as many awards. While much of this work is absolutely brilliant, it goes largely unseen, simply because short form animation is a niche product and there’s really no easy way to market or sell it. Thankfully, the FBoC occasionally puts out a compilation disc, like the spectacular collection Animation Express, which gives us easy access to 39 of the film board’s most wildly imaginative and technically stunning productions from the past 10 years.
The incomparable Madame Tutli-Putli...
With the sheer variety of animation styles (and budgets), you'd expect Animation Express to be all over the place visually, but I was surprised by how consistently striking the collection is as a whole, picture quality-wise. To get the negatives out of the way first, with nearly four hours of high definition material crammed onto a BD-50, there are bound to be some compression-related issues. And yes, if you have a large screen and you look for it, you'll definitely notice some slight— slight—macroblocking in out-of-focus portions of the image, along with the occasional bout of motion artifacts and the rare instance of stair-step banding in subtle color gradients. Really, though, these defects are negligible, and in no way detracted or distracted from my enjoyment of the collection. With the exception of a handful of films that look upscaled, like Paradise, Rains, and Retouches, along with Pimp My Boat, which is presented in 1080i, all of the shorts have been given 1080p/AVC encodes that are simply stunning. With pen, pencil, and charcoal work, lines are crisp, and oftentimes you can even make out the texture of the paper the film was drawn on. Other mediums are just as impressive. The few CGI pieces are vibrant and dimensional, and the stop-motion, "claymation" shorts are uniformly jaw dropping (Madame Tutli-Putli, Sainte Barbe, and Land of the Heads are real stand-outs). All films benefit from high definition, but the increase in color and clarity is especially advantageous for animation. This is one collection that you'll return to frequently, if only to show your favorite shorts to your friends.
You may be disappointed to learn that Animation Express lacks lossless audio, but you shouldn't be. The included English and French Dolby Digital 5.1 surround tracks sound just fine, and are more than capable of handling the limited audio requirements that most of these shorts have anyhow. I mean, these films aren't exactly mini-Michael Bay action epics, with booming dynamic range and non-stop cross-channel sound effects. The vast majority of the shorts have a front-heavy mixture of a dialogue/narration and score, though that's not to say there isn't some fantastic sound design at work in some of the sonically beefier productions. Music is the key ingredient to the mood established in most of the films, and whether its provincial French accordion sounds, as in The Necktie, or droning, elegiac ambience, the scores sound wonderful, with a grounded low end and plenty of crisp detail. The sound effects in many of the shorts are excellent as well, from the industrial menace of Drux Flux to the chicken squawks galore in both Cot Cot and At Home With Mrs. Hen. Dialogue and narration, when present, ride high in the mix, and there are no muffles, drop- outs, or hisses to be heard. Optional English and French subtitles are available in easy to read white lettering.
Okay, so technically, the disc includes 26 animated shorts and 13 "bonus" shorts, but these bonus shorts are just additions that weren't present on the previous DVD release of Animation Express. It has nothing to do with quality or length, and the "bonus" shorts are lumped in with the rest when you hit "play all," meaning, there is no "bonus shorts" section on menu. Anyway, if you don't count these so-called bonuses as supplementary features, the only other extras on the disc are four 1080i trailers, Stories and Destinies (2:05), Volatile Materials (1:37), Mindtravel (1:31), and Seven to See! (1:31).
I love having a compilation like this on Blu-ray. Instead of tracking down all of these films on YouTube or the Film Board of Canada website, I can pop in this disc and bliss out to some of the world's most original and technically accomplished animated shorts. If you've already got Fantastic Mr. Fox and the Wallace & Gromit set, this is the next must-have animation release to add to your collection. Highly Recommended.
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