Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Battle for Terra Blu-ray Movie Review

Give peace a chance…

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater September 23, 2009

To paraphrase CGI guru Brad Bird, animation is not a genre—it’s an art form—and you can do anything with it. While Asian and European directors have used animation to explore some definitely, defiantly adult themes, here in the good old U.S. of A we’ve got a habit of seeing the medium as a realm for kiddie fare. Director Aristomenis Tsirbas wants to change that. His debut feature film Battle for Terra doles out some heady issues—genocide, fundamentalism, war, sacrifice—but it does so under the guise of kid-tested, mother-approved CGI imagery. It’s a strange dichotomy, and I’m not sure that it works entirely. Even if they’re targeted mainly to children, films by Pixar and Dreamworks tend to have something for everyone—kids and adults alike—but I’m hard-pressed to speculate on Battle for Terra’s target audience. Grownups—animation fans excluded—will be less-than-impressed by the film’s juvenile look and overt, moralizing message. Older kids will pick up on the themes but might be too bored to care, and younger children will probably be frightened by the movie’s ample menace.

The peaceful world of Terra...

Based on the director’s own animated short and expanded by screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos, Battle for Terra was originally conceived as a live-action sci-fi epic with photo-realistic CGI elements, a la James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar. And the resemblances don’t end there. If you’ve read up on Avatar, you’ll notice a strikingly similar premise.

Basically, the film inverts the classic alien invasion structure by presenting humans as the invading force. Having long since destroyed Earth, Venus, and Mars—apparently no one heeded An Inconvenient Truth—the last holdouts of humanity are holed up on an intergalactic ark, drifting for generations while trying to locate a suitable new world to inhabit. Cue Terra, a life-sustaining planet populated by squiggly and sentient tadpole-like creatures with big bulging eyes and cuteness to spare. The native Terrians are a peaceful lot, but they’re led by a fundamentalist eldership that strictly forbids technological advancement. You see, the Terrians once nearly wiped themselves out—cough, nuclear proliferation, cough—but the elders had the sense to lock up their weapons in a forbidden shrine to the planet’s past. When the human ark eclipses one of Terra’s suns, the naïve, animist natives assume it must be some new god, here to whisk them away. Spunky young inventor Mala (Evan Rachel Wood) learns the truth via her illegally constructed telescope, but she’s too late to warn her people of the incoming invasion, led by the ruthless General Hammer (Brian Cox), who’s keen on wiping out the peaceful populace and “terraforming” the planet. Crashed fighter pilot Lt. Jim Stanton (Luke Wilson) forms an unlikely bond with Mala, and when forced into a moral choice between his people and hers, Jim opts, unsurprisingly, to do the right thing.

You could easily read Battle for Terra as an allegory about Iraq—a victory-obsessed military invades a fundamentalist nation that has precious natural resources—but this is never made explicit. More than abundantly clear, however, are the film’s diatribes about war in general, the necessity of environmental awareness, and the dangers of misguided and all-powerful authority figures. I appreciate that the filmmakers have something to say, and I whole-heartedly agree with all their assertions, but they aren’t exactly subtle when pounding in their message in with a heavy iron fist. The film draws its dialectic battle lines at the expense of character development and a cohesive plot. When you break down the major story beats, not much really happens over the course of the film’s brief 84 minutes. It’s clear that a good deal of padding has been inserted to fluff the original short film up to a feature running time. Yet, oddly enough, several possible and potentially interesting subplots—including a rebellion by human soldiers who disagree with Gen. Hammer’s tactics—are hinted at but ultimately ignored. What hurts the film most, however, are the rushed set-ups to introduce all the characters and establish their relationships. If the story had been given a little more breathing room, and the plot was filled out —in a good way—by a few more turns, Battle for Terra might have had an underdog shot at the CGI title.

It might not match a Pixar title for sheer technical prowess—there’s simply not enough personality invested in the character animation—but Battle for Terra is frequently impressive, especially considering that director Aristomenis Tsirbas created almost 80% of the film single-handedly, models, animatics, pre-vis and all. The world of Terra is certainly cohesive, and though the character designs are decidedly minimalist, I was drawn in by several of the creatures—especially the huge, docile flying whales. There are several sequences that are genuinely awe-inspiring, like the Terranian’s Festival of Life, which finds all manner of species floating over the cloud-nestled city in a lazily gyring ballet. Action scenes too are handled with competence, though you should expect plenty of cribbing from the Star Wars prequels. The voice work, however, is mixed. Mark Hamill is fantastic (and underused) as the grave Elder Orin, and Brian Cox imbues the despicable General Hammer with some semblance of humanity, but Luke Wilson’s voice screams “thin,” not the beefy space Marine that is Jim, and the usually hilarious David Cross is wasted doing a C-3PO impression as Giddy, Jim’s robot familiar. Evan Rachel Wood is better, but even her leading role comes off as somewhat non-descript.

It may have a ham-fisted message and a clumsy-thumbed plot, but The Battle for Terra deserves some attention for being an independent voice in a medium dominated by two major studios. I actually liked this one more than the critical side of me would like to admit, and you're an animation or sci-fi fan who’s willing to look past some glaring faults, you might too.

Battle for Terra Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Battle for Terra may not boast the best CGI on the market, but it looks stellar on Blu-ray nonetheless, thanks to a vivid 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer. Though the film's aesthetic favors simple character designs with minimal texture, the details that are apparent are sharp and clean. Like the best CGI feature films, Terra displays a terrific sense of dimensional presence, assisted by great contrast and some well implemented artificial depth of field. Black levels are expertly tuned and colors are saturated and weighty. I was constantly impressed, if not by the CGI itself, then by the ultra-colorful palette. Terra's evening sky is a deep midnight tone, glowing magenta thrusters power the human spacecrafts, and the long shots of the galaxy are layered with fuchsia, purple, red, and blue. It's clear than this is a straight, digital-to-digital transfer, and the image is pristine, with very little noise at all. I did notice some slight banding in a few of the more subtle color gradients, but it's hardly distracting and there are no other compression-related issues to be found. Terra may not stand up to its Pixar and Dreamworks cousins, but considered on its own merits, it looks outstanding on Blu-ray.

Battle for Terra Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's A/V package is further bolstered by a capable and battle-ready uncompressed PCM 5.1 surround track. While many films have lots of ambience in the rear channels and few discrete effects, Terra goes the opposite direction. There are some environment-establishing sounds, but this track is characterized by big, cross-channel swooshes of spacecraft and directional laser pulses that criss-cross the soundfield with precision. The dogfights in the sky over Terra offer near- constant surround engagement, and the rest of the film keeps up with clear and well-planned sound design. Dialogue is nestled comfortably in the center channel, and apart from a few low sounding lines by Giddy, voices come through cleanly in the mix. On the dynamic spectrum, the film shows a great deal of range, growling out with deep LFE rumble while allowing the flutes, horns, and strings of Abel Korzeniowski's excellent score to show off the intricacies of their timbres.

Battle for Terra Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Making of Battle for Terra (1080i, 4:45)
For such a complex undertaking—even with a modern workflow, CGI takes forever—this making of featurette is dreadfully short. Here director Aristomenis Tsirbas and screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos discuss some of the film's underlying themes, while a few members of the visual effects team explain their roles in the production. There's really not much here, but most of the questions you might have are thankfully answered in the director's commentary track.

Commentary with Director Aristomenis Tsirbas, Screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos, and Editor Jim May
Making up for the underwhelming "making of" featurette, Tsirbas, Spiliotopoulos, and May offer up an informative track that explores nearly every facet of the film's production. As an independently financed animated feature, Battle for Terra had to crawl over many obstacles that a bigger budgeted Pixar film could easily surmount, and Tsirbas details some of the inventive processes used to bring a shoe-string CGI story to life. About halfway through the film, the commentary starts to get a little dull, though, as the participants start to dwell too much on some of the obvious characterization and thematic content. A decent enough listen, but by no means essential.

Deleted Scenes (1080p, 6:58)
There are four deleted scenes here. "Forbidden Hobby" shows Mala creating another illegal invention, "Some Creepy Weird Thing" shows the Terranian's initial reaction to the human ark, "Snow Monster!" is—you guessed it—an encounter with a snow monster, and "Maria's Call to Action" gives voice to one of the human dissenters.

From Storyboard to Final Render: Mala Sneaks Around (1080p, 00:24)
In this brief clip, the screen is divided into four quadrants—storyboards, animatics, a rough CGI pre-visualization, and the final render.

Animatics: Mala's Escape (1080p, 2:15)
I'll just write out the accompanying text for this feature, because it really is impressive: "A year before actual production, director Aristomenis Tsirbas single-handedly created all the designs, storyboards and majority of the 3-D models for the entire film. He then lit, animated, and edited an advanced 3-D animatic that completed up to 80% of the film minus character animation and visual effects. This unusual approach was necessary in order to realistically complete an epic animated adventure under a very tight budget. The following clip shows Tsirbas' original animatic accompanied by the final production version."

Production Design (1080p)
This is a user-controlled gallery of 18 sketches created when the director was pitching the film.

Aristomenis Tsirbas: Pulling the Strings (1080p, 1:29)
In this animated short, Tsirbas literally injects a CGI version of himself into the film's environments and explains his filmmaking influences and aesthetic.

Also From Lionsgate (1080p, 2:08)
Includes a trailer for Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow.

Battle for Terra Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Just to reiterate, Battle for Terra is definitely no Pixar production, but it has a style all its own and a story to tell, even if the message sometimes muddles the plot. The film makes a grand entrance on Blu-ray with a vivid picture and lossless sound, so the more forgiving among you may feel swayed to a purchase based on Terra's technical merits. I probably wouldn't buy this for a younger child—people and aliens do get asphyxiated in a fairly intense manner—but if you're simply looking for another piece of CGI candy on Blu-ray, Battle for Terra more than capably meets the requirements.